The shorter version: falsifiability alone is not a good determiner of whether a hypothesis is scientific, because you must also consider verifiability (and perhaps testability). Falsifiable and verifiable statements are always pairs: If hypothesis A is falsifiable, then Not A is verifiable, and vice versa. The "scientificness" of A and Not A is always identical, since they describe the exact same knowledge, and a test to verify one is automatically a test to falsify the other.
Longer: You are correct about whether those statements are falsifiable. However, to say that "falsifiability is one of the requirements for a hypothesis to be scientific" is not very useful. While "neutrinos have nonzero rest mass" may not be falsifiable, it is definitely verifiable: There could be an experimental result which proves it true (in the experimental sense rather than the mathematical, of course). If that result were to occur, scientist could use that result with confidence in further experiments and theory. If anything, I would call the hypothesis "neutrinos have zero rest mass" less scientific. If you can never say it has been scientifically demonstrated, then of what use is it?
Another facet is testability. Falsifiability alone as a determiner of "scientificness" would suggest that "there are no gods" is a scientific hypothesis, because it could easily be disproved if a god showed up and starting doing miracles left and right to everyone's satisfaction. Blech.
Perhaps you are confusing "hypothesis" with "claim of truth." If there is an unfalsifiable statement that someone claims is true because it hasn't been proven false, they are making an unscientific claim ("God exists because you haven't disproven His existence."). If they are denying an unverifiable claim because nobody has proved it true, they are also making an unscientific claim ("neutrinos have non-zero rest mass because nobody has proven they have zero rest mass."). However, that doesn't necessarily make those questions unscientific. It only means that, since there is only one side that can possibly be demonstrated, the only states of knowledge around the hypothesis are "scientifically unknown" and "true" for verifiable hypotheses or "false" for falsifiable ones.
In this case, the hypothesis "neutrinos have non-zero rest mass" is not something someone is claiming to be true, but rather one phrasing of the question which is being explored by experiment in a scientific fashion, with a possibility of reaching a definite answer. By any reasonable definition of the phrase "scientific hypothesis," it is one.
True, times were different. Thanks for providing those details... I was trying to keep my first comment short and abrasive so they didn't really fit with either goal:-).
However, there was clearly a lot of opposition to the war at the time, much more so than our current military action. (After all, do you see many newspapers or even crazy bloggers advocating treason?) What worries me is that W has said many times that "history will judge him" (or something to that effect), and it seems like he expects to be the same sort of American hero as Abe, but for "bringing democracy" instead of "ending slavery."
I'm also not sure that rebellion or invasion is an appropriate word to use in place of secession. There was no threat to anyone in the North's safety until they were conscripted to go down South and fight to force those states to rejoin the Union. Had the North simply allowed the country to split, there wouldn't have been significant violence (as far as my limited understanding goes, anyway). From a modern standpoint, it would allow people to have a federal government that more closely matches their preferences, if the distribution of red and blue states is anything to go by.
Of course, that leaves slavery as a separate issue, but with the opposition that people have to being the World Police today, I'm not sure how invading another territory to end slavery can be justified in the same breath. It's definitely a tricky issue. The Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery in the South but not the North definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth though, reminding me of our current military insistence on fair democratic elections in other countries while using sketchy electronic voting machines here.
Just some interesting comparisons to think about, even if (as you say) they aren't perfect matches.
What makes you think he'd be opposed to the current Republicans? He'd probably say "W, Gitmo is pretty cool, but why aren't you putting anti-war newspaper editors and bloggers there too? Naw, you don't have to give them a civilian trial... just suspend Habeas Corpus because you're 'at war,' and ignore any court rulings that say you can't. It worked for me!"
That guy is either a complete idiot or stuck in a time warp from 1995. I had to stop reading to avoid endumbening myself any further. Here's a few examples so others may be spared the whole "article:"
When you see a number in a cell, you don't know if that is a pure number or a number that is derived from a formula in the cell. While this distinction is usually immaterial, it can be critical.
The leading example is sorting. When rows are sorted, usually it is desired to sort the numbers as they are. However, it will be the formulas that are sorted.
His "leading example" is simply wrong. (Unless perhaps he's referring to spreadsheet programs other than Excel, OpenOffice Calc, and Google Spreadsheets?)
Given the nature of spreadsheets (and humans), there is a tendency to favor few errors. Hence, for example, the convention of zero values for strings in numerical functions.
Again, in any spreadsheet programs I've used, 5 + "blah" is an error condition. It would not evaluate to 5. The expression SUM(A1:A5) is also an error if any cell from A1 to A5 has a string in it. Is he just making this shit up? Not to mention, some programming languages do implicit conversion of strings as well. Not many, but probably comparable in number and popularity to the spreadsheet programs that do so. As I mentioned earlier, for sake of my remaining intelligence, I didn't read far enough to tell if he recommended any such languages.
Complex data (for example, statistical or mathematical structures) demand a convention for placement of the components. In practice the most common convention is higgledy-piggledy.
Ah yes, the old "tool X is bad because many users of tool X are bad." Once I got to this point I realized there wouldn't be anything of value in the rest of it. Blech. It makes me sad that the parent post wasn't modded funny.
I was chatting with a Harmonix rep at their booth at PAX. He mentioned that the Paramore song is really compressed/limited on the CD (in the sense of lack of dynamic range). No surprise there. I asked him whether that affected their game at all, and he said that since they got access to the master tracks and mixed it themselves, not really. I'd expect the same is true of almost any Rock Band or Guitar Hero track.
That was great to hear, because the loudness war sucks. There have been a number of albums that I would have liked listening to, but can't stand because of the loudness war. They sound the same all the way through, and the drummer sounds like he's playing in the other room while everyone else is standing too close to the mics. A drum hit, during the brief moment it happens, should be much louder than the rest of the band! Instruments shouldn't get quieter when other instruments start playing! Blech.
Interestingly, I was listening to the Rock Band 2 setlist to get to know the songs I'd never heard (downloaded mp3s), and one song in particular stood out as being very well mixed with great dynamic range. I don't really like the music of Modest Mouse, but it was definitely a pleasure to listen to Float On just for that. They earned a bit of respect from me that day:).
You say that people will take loans they can't afford, "if you let them." However, nobody can just take a loan on their own. They need someone else to give it to them, and a loan that's bad for the borrower is also bad for the lender. The proper way to ensure that the "right" amount of loans are taken is to let the person who is getting all the reward (interest) bear all the risk (default). If the risk is reduced by any amount but the reward isn't, then there will be "too much" lending. Period. To say otherwise would be to suggest that financial institutions are selfless and not interested in money. Past government bailouts, and the expectation that they would continue in the future, caused exactly this imbalance. (Interestingly, artificial depression of the interest rate by the central bank also increases the reward side, making it a double-encouragement for otherwise bad loans.)
The real bug is that the financial industry knows that if everyone does the same thing, and it blows up, the government will step in and give them money. They were right. Sure, they still don't end up in a good place, but it's a much better place than if they had to take responsibility for their own actions instead of foisting the cost onto the rest of us. This effect is called "moral hazard" and has a lot more to do with the current situation than "bugs in capitalism." In fact, it is not free enterprise at all when someone takes money from you by force (taxes) to pay for someone else's debts. I've heard it called many things, but it's basically government in bed with big business. A lot of people hate on "capitalism" when they really mean this sort of corporatism, which dismays those of us who are used to using the term capitalism to refer to a lack of government intervention.
Now I'm not saying that my idea of capitalism is immune to problems... that goes far beyond the scope of a comment like this. I'm just saying that it was not the cause of the credit crisis and I hate to see the blame slide off of the true culprits.
Of course, I'll still be getting GH:WT for my Wii for a lot of other reasons, including a more complex drumset and these gems from the setlist announcement: * At The Drive-In - One Armed Scissor * Mars Volta - L'Via L'Viaquez * Tool - Parabola * Tool - Schism * Tool - Vicarious
I knew Tool would have to show up in one of the games eventually, but I have to say I was very surprised to see both ATDI and The Mars Volta, two of my other favorites.
Today, I make almost four times what he did Just want to point out that this isn't true. Likely you make only slightly more than he did... no more than twice as much, certainly. The dollars that you are getting four times as many of aren't worth nearly as much, because there are four times as many circulating as there were 25 years ago! (According to M3: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2005/11/changes_in_m1_m.html)
Your point is still valid though, because you certainly aren't making any less than your father did.
All of your actual points seem to consist of uninformed scaremongering. This should teach us that all a "casual reading" by a non-lawyer, non-biologist is only good enough for a +5 insightful, not for anything resembling facts.
While you can't discriminate based on genetic material the section 210 states that if the information is found by any other means it is permissible (even if it is a genetic related issue). So this for the most part will have no effect on Medical Insurance companies. All of the 200-level sections are about employment. They have no connection to anything related to medical insurance companies (except in the sense that they, like other companies, have employees).
For example if one of my parents suffered from a genetic disease then they could discriminate against me based on that information and not on actually checking if I have the genetic markers or not. Apparently you didn't read enough "bits" of the bill. I actually read the entire section on medical insurance, which is how I know that family manifestation of any disease is considered "genetic information" (even if it's not a genetically-transmitted disease!) See my comment here for the quote from the bill.
Section 103 seems to mention that if a health company came by your genetic information via another source (3rd party) then it is permissible to use it. Did you just make this up? The closest thing in 103 seems to be this:
"`(3) INCIDENTAL COLLECTION- If a group health plan obtains genetic information incidental to the requesting, requiring, or purchasing of other information concerning any individual, such request, requirement, or purchase shall not be considered a violation of paragraph (2) if such request, requirement, or purchase is not in violation of paragraph (1)."
However, paragraph (1) states that they still can't use that information for underwriting purposes (i.e. charging a different amount or rejecting the policy), so that's not much of a loophole at all.
Genetic testing IS NOT.. "an analysis of proteins or metabolites that is directly related to a manifested disease, disorder, or pathological condition that could reasonably be detected by a health care professional with appropriate training and expertise in the field of medicine involved." As my bolding indicates, this bill excludes diseases that the person is already suffering from, and which are already showing symptoms. That's what a "manifested" disease is. This bill is to protect people whose genotype indicates a higher likelihood of a certain condition, but who do not already have it.
I wonder how [using family history] will fare under the law. The text of the act can be found here (Version ENR is the final enrolled version).
Here's what it has to say about family history, with my bolding:
SEC. 101. AMENDMENTS TO EMPLOYEE RETIREMENT INCOME SECURITY ACT OF 1974.
[...]
(d) Definitions- Section 733(d) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (29 U.S.C. 1191b(d)) is amended by adding at the end the following:
[...]
`(6) GENETIC INFORMATION-
`(A) IN GENERAL- The term `genetic information' means, with respect to any individual, information about--
`(i) such individual's genetic tests,
`(ii) the genetic tests of family members of such individual, and
`(iii) the manifestation of a disease or disorder in family members of such individual.
[...]
`(C) EXCLUSIONS- The term `genetic information' shall not include information about the sex or age of any individual. It seems that requiring someone to provide family history of a disease is now forbidden.
There are a number of replies already pointing out various reasons why releasing a cleansing worm is not a good idea. In addition I just want to relate a story of an actual virus infection.
One year when I returned from summer vacation to my college campus, internet connectivity was very spotty. It got worse as more people came back, and we eventually learned it was entirely due to virus traffic. Anyone who plugged in a computer to the network found that it would get infected and spontaneously reboot in a few minutes, and then start looking for other hosts to infect. It was pretty bad for at least a week, and finally the campus techs disabled everyone's internet until they had run the removal tool supervised by a tech in person. This process took at least another week to get most people up and running.
The virus that caused all the trouble? Welchia, a "white knight" worm that patched the vulnerability that the Blaster worm was exploiting. The difference is that Blaster didn't bring our entire campus network to its knees for weeks, and it wouldn't have.
That said, there is a difference between a self-replicating fix and a single act of cleansing. I think if the researchers had a list of infected clients and the chance to send a non-propagating fix to each one, they should have done it. Of course, they also shouldn't have told anyone, for obvious legal reasons, so maybe they did and we just don't know.:-)
I had the opposite experience with GTA2 (PC), which did use TCP. The LAN stability was pretty good given that the multiplayer seemed like a tacked-on feature, but it would still de-sync on rare occasions. It would keep you connected, still sending your input commands to the other computers, without realizing everyone else's machine had a different idea of where your character was. The end result was your character running in seemingly random directions, easy pickings for everyone else... except on your machine where you inexplicably started kicking ass:-)
We spent SO many nights in college playing deathmatches, and I agree with the OP that multiplayer is the easiest ticket to replayability. Even the GTA2 single player, though, has quite a bit. Some of the highest tier missions in the last section of the city are damn near impossible, so you never run out of things to test your skill or to improve at. The city is so huge that you can always discover something new by wandering around, and there's tons of collectibles and unlockables. That's been a hallmark of the series since the very beginning, so I always die a little inside when people talk like GTA3 was the revolutionary one. All they changed for that one was 2d -> 3d, and a gritter more realistic feel to the environment and missions. I tried it, but stuck with GTA2 instead.
Someone else made this point, but I'm going to draw it out in a bit more detail to emphasize it.
Chances are by the time you get to the point where you have to use the last resort, you won't have your firearms. If you've ever learned boolean logic, you may be familiar with the following truth: The statements "if A then B" and "if 'not B' then 'not A'" are equivalent. For example, saying "if an animal is a tiger, then it has stripes" is logically equivalent to saying "if an animal has NO stripes, then it is NOT a tiger." If one of those is true, then the other one is also true.
So, breaking down your claim above: If A, then B. A = you get to the point where you have to use the last resort B = you do not have your firearms Not B = you DO have your firearms Not A = you DO NOT get to the point where you have to use the last resort
Chances are if you DO have your firearms, you WILL NOT get to the point where you have to use the last resort. Which is exactly the point. Whether guns are the canary whose death heralds totalitarianism or the cornered badger that fights back as a last resort, they can be equally said to "protect democracy."
The whole idea that junk mail adverts and junk email adverts are analogous is as much a fallacy as the application of the broken window parable to the situation in the first place. I completely agree that junk mail and spam are not analogous. I think junk mail is a much more acceptable form of advertising than spam. It is clearly a "good thing" from the standpoint of the businesses and the post office and some receivers, and only a "slightly bad thing" for the rest of the receivers. The broken window is not directly applicable because nothing is directly destroying value, but is used in general to illustrate how make-work arguments are leaving something out.
I just wanted to point out how those arguments that were being used to support junk mail were distracting from the actual reasons why physical junk mail isn't as bad as spam (which you explained): spam has a very low required response rate to be profitable, thanks to the miniscule costs (which don't include the negative externalities of time spent by sysadmins and uninterested readers). The balance between the costs borne by the sender and by third parties is way more out of whack for spam than for physical junk mail.
You mean the ones who are left after the massive rounds of layoffs. "More efficient" in this case means "fewer people on the payroll". Yes, some people are out of a job temporarily whenever there is a regime change (think buggy whips). That is an argument for the status quo, not for junk mail [nor against junk mail, which I never claimed it was]. It just so happens those two are currently the same.
Note that the argument works in reverse: if there were currently no junk mail allowed through the post office, but they were considering changing their rules to allow it, you could say there'd be layoffs like crazy in other areas of advertising that would be replaced by the superior targeted junk mail. After all, "regardless of medium, that dollar will be spent" and many of those dollars would switch away from other advertising, because "Flyer advertsing [...] nets a far better cost:benefit ratio for their advertising dollar." So, if there was already a rule against junk mail you'd support keeping that rule to preserve jobs, right?
If anything, your argument about the effectiveness and efficiency of flyer advertising suggests that it "creates" (requires) less jobs while producing greater benefits. Fortunately, that's a good thing. The fact that other advertising alternatives create more jobs is not a reason to consider them. There may be other reasons, but that's not one.
As someone else replied, the broken window fallacy has nothing to do with whether the act is legal or illegal. Rather, it refers to justifying anything because it "creates jobs." This is exactly what the original poster did:
"[Can junk mail be good?] Yes. [...] people are paid money to create those ads, print them, address them and mail them. Not only that, the USPO is paid at bulk mail rates for carrying them."
Let me rephrase:
"[Cab breaking the windows of one's own house be good?] Yes. [...] people are paid money to create the replacement glass, nails, deliver them and install them. Not only that, the USPO is paid for shipping them from the factory."
How is it different? Whether or not junk mail is a "good thing," this particular justification for it is completely invalid. If the post office wasn't delivering so much junk mail, their employees could be doing something else for which they would also get paid. If businesses did not advertise with junk mail, they could be advertising in some other way that would also pay people. Junk mail (and broken windows) do not create jobs. They merely divert those jobs from doing something else.
Note: I am not arguing against junk mail, but rather this piece of "logic." The rest of the original post was quite good, identifying the main valid arguments for and against junk mail: the senders and some recipients do actually benefit, but the senders don't face the true cost, passing on a negative externality to the unwilling recipients (and in the case of spam, the delivery services).
The BBC perhaps overstates the certainty with which the dark-matter theory is held, and doesn't mention that the postulated properties of such particles are completely speculative. Aside from the actual topic, I want to say that I was pleasantly surprised to see the summary correcting for the improper journalism of the article. Overzealous interpretation of scientific results by journalists is a common complaint around here, and our editors who know that (and can easily recognize it when they review the submission) are the perfect ones to catch the inaccuracy and notify us in advance, so we aren't mislead about the actual claims of the scientific paper. Thanks, kdawson, for the excellent editorial addition to this story.
No, this isn't the case. Any developer who wants Internet Explorer to use its most recent rendering engine at all times can select "edge" and be done with it. Am I the only one who doesn't find this reassuring in the least?
Setting -- 2014 AD. Microsoft's IE10 includes a dramatically improved rendering engine with better compliance to standards. This causes it to render pages significantly differently from IE8 and IE9.
Microsoft: "To take advantage of our new rendering engine, please add the following tag to each page: [...]"
Us: "What about the 'edge' attribute? Shouldn't you force everyone who specified that to follow standards by rendering their pages with the new engine?"
Microsoft: "Too many pages are using that to mean 'render like IE8/9,' and using browser-specific hacks for those engines. It would break the web if we changed the rendering of those pages. Don't worry, we've added the attribute 'modern' that will always mean 'use the latest rendering engine,' so you'll never have this problem again."
Assuming you received this, it says that "non-members may use the cash cards to shop in the warehouse or online." I saw them in the store and wondered the same thing... it wouldn't make much sense if you could only give them to members. This way it actually functions as some good advertising, by letting a non-member try it out without risking the $50 fee.
There is no way they can tell whether a hidden volume exists without the password (assuming the cryptographic protocols are not flawed in a currently unknown way). So, by analogy to your argument, there's also nothing stopping them from locking you up until you confess to murder and tell them where the body is, or it's been long enough for them to be convinced you don't know.
Oh wait, yes there is. In the United States, it's called due process of law, including the right to a speedy and public trial. It is a basic human right, but the federation's founders were worried people in the future might not think so, so they specifically spelled it out in the Bill of Rights.
(If you are arguing about a police state where this concept doesn't exist, then it's kind of pointless. You may "disappear" simply for having an encrypted partition at all.)
Of course people are going to install programs as administrator... a) Why? I run many programs in-place after unzipping them to whatever folder I want. b) In a sane operating system, software installations that require administrator privileges should be sandboxed. I know mine are. (And no, I am not limited to a software repository that someone else has assembled. Many non-repository apps or fresh new versions are as easy as a Windows click-through installer, although the tricky ones can be quite a hassle.)
Slashdot Mirror
The shorter version: falsifiability alone is not a good determiner of whether a hypothesis is scientific, because you must also consider verifiability (and perhaps testability). Falsifiable and verifiable statements are always pairs: If hypothesis A is falsifiable, then Not A is verifiable, and vice versa. The "scientificness" of A and Not A is always identical, since they describe the exact same knowledge, and a test to verify one is automatically a test to falsify the other.
Longer:
You are correct about whether those statements are falsifiable. However, to say that "falsifiability is one of the requirements for a hypothesis to be scientific" is not very useful. While "neutrinos have nonzero rest mass" may not be falsifiable, it is definitely verifiable: There could be an experimental result which proves it true (in the experimental sense rather than the mathematical, of course). If that result were to occur, scientist could use that result with confidence in further experiments and theory. If anything, I would call the hypothesis "neutrinos have zero rest mass" less scientific. If you can never say it has been scientifically demonstrated, then of what use is it?
Another facet is testability. Falsifiability alone as a determiner of "scientificness" would suggest that "there are no gods" is a scientific hypothesis, because it could easily be disproved if a god showed up and starting doing miracles left and right to everyone's satisfaction. Blech.
Perhaps you are confusing "hypothesis" with "claim of truth." If there is an unfalsifiable statement that someone claims is true because it hasn't been proven false, they are making an unscientific claim ("God exists because you haven't disproven His existence."). If they are denying an unverifiable claim because nobody has proved it true, they are also making an unscientific claim ("neutrinos have non-zero rest mass because nobody has proven they have zero rest mass."). However, that doesn't necessarily make those questions unscientific. It only means that, since there is only one side that can possibly be demonstrated, the only states of knowledge around the hypothesis are "scientifically unknown" and "true" for verifiable hypotheses or "false" for falsifiable ones.
In this case, the hypothesis "neutrinos have non-zero rest mass" is not something someone is claiming to be true, but rather one phrasing of the question which is being explored by experiment in a scientific fashion, with a possibility of reaching a definite answer. By any reasonable definition of the phrase "scientific hypothesis," it is one.
True, times were different. Thanks for providing those details... I was trying to keep my first comment short and abrasive so they didn't really fit with either goal :-).
However, there was clearly a lot of opposition to the war at the time, much more so than our current military action. (After all, do you see many newspapers or even crazy bloggers advocating treason?) What worries me is that W has said many times that "history will judge him" (or something to that effect), and it seems like he expects to be the same sort of American hero as Abe, but for "bringing democracy" instead of "ending slavery."
I'm also not sure that rebellion or invasion is an appropriate word to use in place of secession. There was no threat to anyone in the North's safety until they were conscripted to go down South and fight to force those states to rejoin the Union. Had the North simply allowed the country to split, there wouldn't have been significant violence (as far as my limited understanding goes, anyway). From a modern standpoint, it would allow people to have a federal government that more closely matches their preferences, if the distribution of red and blue states is anything to go by.
Of course, that leaves slavery as a separate issue, but with the opposition that people have to being the World Police today, I'm not sure how invading another territory to end slavery can be justified in the same breath. It's definitely a tricky issue. The Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery in the South but not the North definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth though, reminding me of our current military insistence on fair democratic elections in other countries while using sketchy electronic voting machines here.
Just some interesting comparisons to think about, even if (as you say) they aren't perfect matches.
What makes you think he'd be opposed to the current Republicans? He'd probably say "W, Gitmo is pretty cool, but why aren't you putting anti-war newspaper editors and bloggers there too? Naw, you don't have to give them a civilian trial... just suspend Habeas Corpus because you're 'at war,' and ignore any court rulings that say you can't. It worked for me!"
That guy is either a complete idiot or stuck in a time warp from 1995. I had to stop reading to avoid endumbening myself any further. Here's a few examples so others may be spared the whole "article:"
When you see a number in a cell, you don't know if that is a pure number or a number that is derived from a formula in the cell. While this distinction is usually immaterial, it can be critical.
The leading example is sorting. When rows are sorted, usually it is desired to sort the numbers as they are. However, it will be the formulas that are sorted.
His "leading example" is simply wrong. (Unless perhaps he's referring to spreadsheet programs other than Excel, OpenOffice Calc, and Google Spreadsheets?)
Given the nature of spreadsheets (and humans), there is a tendency to favor few errors. Hence, for example, the convention of zero values for strings in numerical functions.
Again, in any spreadsheet programs I've used, 5 + "blah" is an error condition. It would not evaluate to 5. The expression SUM(A1:A5) is also an error if any cell from A1 to A5 has a string in it. Is he just making this shit up? Not to mention, some programming languages do implicit conversion of strings as well. Not many, but probably comparable in number and popularity to the spreadsheet programs that do so. As I mentioned earlier, for sake of my remaining intelligence, I didn't read far enough to tell if he recommended any such languages.
Complex data (for example, statistical or mathematical structures) demand a convention for placement of the components. In practice the most common convention is higgledy-piggledy.
Ah yes, the old "tool X is bad because many users of tool X are bad." Once I got to this point I realized there wouldn't be anything of value in the rest of it. Blech. It makes me sad that the parent post wasn't modded funny.
I was chatting with a Harmonix rep at their booth at PAX. He mentioned that the Paramore song is really compressed/limited on the CD (in the sense of lack of dynamic range). No surprise there. I asked him whether that affected their game at all, and he said that since they got access to the master tracks and mixed it themselves, not really. I'd expect the same is true of almost any Rock Band or Guitar Hero track.
That was great to hear, because the loudness war sucks. There have been a number of albums that I would have liked listening to, but can't stand because of the loudness war. They sound the same all the way through, and the drummer sounds like he's playing in the other room while everyone else is standing too close to the mics. A drum hit, during the brief moment it happens, should be much louder than the rest of the band! Instruments shouldn't get quieter when other instruments start playing! Blech.
Interestingly, I was listening to the Rock Band 2 setlist to get to know the songs I'd never heard (downloaded mp3s), and one song in particular stood out as being very well mixed with great dynamic range. I don't really like the music of Modest Mouse, but it was definitely a pleasure to listen to Float On just for that. They earned a bit of respect from me that day :).
You say that people will take loans they can't afford, "if you let them." However, nobody can just take a loan on their own. They need someone else to give it to them, and a loan that's bad for the borrower is also bad for the lender. The proper way to ensure that the "right" amount of loans are taken is to let the person who is getting all the reward (interest) bear all the risk (default). If the risk is reduced by any amount but the reward isn't, then there will be "too much" lending. Period. To say otherwise would be to suggest that financial institutions are selfless and not interested in money. Past government bailouts, and the expectation that they would continue in the future, caused exactly this imbalance. (Interestingly, artificial depression of the interest rate by the central bank also increases the reward side, making it a double-encouragement for otherwise bad loans.)
The real bug is that the financial industry knows that if everyone does the same thing, and it blows up, the government will step in and give them money. They were right. Sure, they still don't end up in a good place, but it's a much better place than if they had to take responsibility for their own actions instead of foisting the cost onto the rest of us. This effect is called "moral hazard" and has a lot more to do with the current situation than "bugs in capitalism." In fact, it is not free enterprise at all when someone takes money from you by force (taxes) to pay for someone else's debts. I've heard it called many things, but it's basically government in bed with big business. A lot of people hate on "capitalism" when they really mean this sort of corporatism, which dismays those of us who are used to using the term capitalism to refer to a lack of government intervention.
Now I'm not saying that my idea of capitalism is immune to problems... that goes far beyond the scope of a comment like this. I'm just saying that it was not the cause of the credit crisis and I hate to see the blame slide off of the true culprits.
Rock Band 1 for Wii was a joke and a mistake, I agree. However, it has been strongly implied (if not confirmed) that Rock Band 2 will have both online play and DLC. See for example http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/08/harmonix-rock-b.html or http://www.joystiq.com/2008/08/06/rock-band-2-for-wii-wont-skimp-on-features/. Since you should really be comparing GH:WT to RB2, not RB1, it's no longer an obvious choice.
Of course, I'll still be getting GH:WT for my Wii for a lot of other reasons, including a more complex drumset and these gems from the setlist announcement:
* At The Drive-In - One Armed Scissor
* Mars Volta - L'Via L'Viaquez
* Tool - Parabola
* Tool - Schism
* Tool - Vicarious
I knew Tool would have to show up in one of the games eventually, but I have to say I was very surprised to see both ATDI and The Mars Volta, two of my other favorites.
Thanks for the writeup. Very understandable without skimping on interesting details. A perfect example of why I read comments and not articles :)
Your point is still valid though, because you certainly aren't making any less than your father did.
"`(3) INCIDENTAL COLLECTION- If a group health plan obtains genetic information incidental to the requesting, requiring, or purchasing of other information concerning any individual, such request, requirement, or purchase shall not be considered a violation of paragraph (2) if such request, requirement, or purchase is not in violation of paragraph (1)."
However, paragraph (1) states that they still can't use that information for underwriting purposes (i.e. charging a different amount or rejecting the policy), so that's not much of a loophole at all. Genetic testing IS NOT..
"an analysis of proteins or metabolites that is directly related to a manifested disease, disorder, or pathological condition that could reasonably be detected by a health care professional with appropriate training and expertise in the field of medicine involved." As my bolding indicates, this bill excludes diseases that the person is already suffering from, and which are already showing symptoms. That's what a "manifested" disease is. This bill is to protect people whose genotype indicates a higher likelihood of a certain condition, but who do not already have it.
Here's what it has to say about family history, with my bolding: SEC. 101. AMENDMENTS TO EMPLOYEE RETIREMENT INCOME SECURITY ACT OF 1974.
[...]
(d) Definitions- Section 733(d) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (29 U.S.C. 1191b(d)) is amended by adding at the end the following:
[...]
`(6) GENETIC INFORMATION-
`(A) IN GENERAL- The term `genetic information' means, with respect to any individual, information about--
`(i) such individual's genetic tests,
`(ii) the genetic tests of family members of such individual, and
`(iii) the manifestation of a disease or disorder in family members of such individual.
[...]
`(C) EXCLUSIONS- The term `genetic information' shall not include information about the sex or age of any individual. It seems that requiring someone to provide family history of a disease is now forbidden.
Thanks. I agree that the point stands regardless of $36B vs. $11B.
What, you can't tell a heavily sarcastic meta-joke when you see one?
Or was this already a running meta-joke before I got here?
There are a number of replies already pointing out various reasons why releasing a cleansing worm is not a good idea. In addition I just want to relate a story of an actual virus infection.
:-)
One year when I returned from summer vacation to my college campus, internet connectivity was very spotty. It got worse as more people came back, and we eventually learned it was entirely due to virus traffic. Anyone who plugged in a computer to the network found that it would get infected and spontaneously reboot in a few minutes, and then start looking for other hosts to infect. It was pretty bad for at least a week, and finally the campus techs disabled everyone's internet until they had run the removal tool supervised by a tech in person. This process took at least another week to get most people up and running.
The virus that caused all the trouble? Welchia, a "white knight" worm that patched the vulnerability that the Blaster worm was exploiting. The difference is that Blaster didn't bring our entire campus network to its knees for weeks, and it wouldn't have.
That said, there is a difference between a self-replicating fix and a single act of cleansing. I think if the researchers had a list of infected clients and the chance to send a non-propagating fix to each one, they should have done it. Of course, they also shouldn't have told anyone, for obvious legal reasons, so maybe they did and we just don't know.
I had the opposite experience with GTA2 (PC), which did use TCP. The LAN stability was pretty good given that the multiplayer seemed like a tacked-on feature, but it would still de-sync on rare occasions. It would keep you connected, still sending your input commands to the other computers, without realizing everyone else's machine had a different idea of where your character was. The end result was your character running in seemingly random directions, easy pickings for everyone else... except on your machine where you inexplicably started kicking ass :-)
We spent SO many nights in college playing deathmatches, and I agree with the OP that multiplayer is the easiest ticket to replayability. Even the GTA2 single player, though, has quite a bit. Some of the highest tier missions in the last section of the city are damn near impossible, so you never run out of things to test your skill or to improve at. The city is so huge that you can always discover something new by wandering around, and there's tons of collectibles and unlockables. That's been a hallmark of the series since the very beginning, so I always die a little inside when people talk like GTA3 was the revolutionary one. All they changed for that one was 2d -> 3d, and a gritter more realistic feel to the environment and missions. I tried it, but stuck with GTA2 instead.
So, breaking down your claim above: If A, then B.
A = you get to the point where you have to use the last resort
B = you do not have your firearms
Not B = you DO have your firearms
Not A = you DO NOT get to the point where you have to use the last resort Chances are if you DO have your firearms, you WILL NOT get to the point where you have to use the last resort. Which is exactly the point. Whether guns are the canary whose death heralds totalitarianism or the cornered badger that fights back as a last resort, they can be equally said to "protect democracy."
I just wanted to point out how those arguments that were being used to support junk mail were distracting from the actual reasons why physical junk mail isn't as bad as spam (which you explained): spam has a very low required response rate to be profitable, thanks to the miniscule costs (which don't include the negative externalities of time spent by sysadmins and uninterested readers). The balance between the costs borne by the sender and by third parties is way more out of whack for spam than for physical junk mail. You mean the ones who are left after the massive rounds of layoffs. "More efficient" in this case means "fewer people on the payroll". Yes, some people are out of a job temporarily whenever there is a regime change (think buggy whips). That is an argument for the status quo, not for junk mail [nor against junk mail, which I never claimed it was]. It just so happens those two are currently the same.
Note that the argument works in reverse: if there were currently no junk mail allowed through the post office, but they were considering changing their rules to allow it, you could say there'd be layoffs like crazy in other areas of advertising that would be replaced by the superior targeted junk mail. After all, "regardless of medium, that dollar will be spent" and many of those dollars would switch away from other advertising, because "Flyer advertsing [...] nets a far better cost:benefit ratio for their advertising dollar." So, if there was already a rule against junk mail you'd support keeping that rule to preserve jobs, right?
If anything, your argument about the effectiveness and efficiency of flyer advertising suggests that it "creates" (requires) less jobs while producing greater benefits. Fortunately, that's a good thing. The fact that other advertising alternatives create more jobs is not a reason to consider them. There may be other reasons, but that's not one.
As someone else replied, the broken window fallacy has nothing to do with whether the act is legal or illegal. Rather, it refers to justifying anything because it "creates jobs." This is exactly what the original poster did:
"[Can junk mail be good?] Yes. [...] people are paid money to create those ads, print them, address them and mail them. Not only that, the USPO is paid at bulk mail rates for carrying them."
Let me rephrase:
"[Cab breaking the windows of one's own house be good?] Yes. [...] people are paid money to create the replacement glass, nails, deliver them and install them. Not only that, the USPO is paid for shipping them from the factory."
How is it different? Whether or not junk mail is a "good thing," this particular justification for it is completely invalid. If the post office wasn't delivering so much junk mail, their employees could be doing something else for which they would also get paid. If businesses did not advertise with junk mail, they could be advertising in some other way that would also pay people. Junk mail (and broken windows) do not create jobs. They merely divert those jobs from doing something else.
Note: I am not arguing against junk mail, but rather this piece of "logic." The rest of the original post was quite good, identifying the main valid arguments for and against junk mail: the senders and some recipients do actually benefit, but the senders don't face the true cost, passing on a negative externality to the unwilling recipients (and in the case of spam, the delivery services).
Setting -- 2014 AD. Microsoft's IE10 includes a dramatically improved rendering engine with better compliance to standards. This causes it to render pages significantly differently from IE8 and IE9.
Microsoft: "To take advantage of our new rendering engine, please add the following tag to each page: [...]"
Us: "What about the 'edge' attribute? Shouldn't you force everyone who specified that to follow standards by rendering their pages with the new engine?"
Microsoft: "Too many pages are using that to mean 'render like IE8/9,' and using browser-specific hacks for those engines. It would break the web if we changed the rendering of those pages. Don't worry, we've added the attribute 'modern' that will always mean 'use the latest rendering engine,' so you'll never have this problem again."
Us: [facepalm]
Assuming you received this, it says that "non-members may use the cash cards to shop in the warehouse or online." I saw them in the store and wondered the same thing... it wouldn't make much sense if you could only give them to members. This way it actually functions as some good advertising, by letting a non-member try it out without risking the $50 fee.
There is no way they can tell whether a hidden volume exists without the password (assuming the cryptographic protocols are not flawed in a currently unknown way). So, by analogy to your argument, there's also nothing stopping them from locking you up until you confess to murder and tell them where the body is, or it's been long enough for them to be convinced you don't know.
Oh wait, yes there is. In the United States, it's called due process of law, including the right to a speedy and public trial. It is a basic human right, but the federation's founders were worried people in the future might not think so, so they specifically spelled it out in the Bill of Rights.
(If you are arguing about a police state where this concept doesn't exist, then it's kind of pointless. You may "disappear" simply for having an encrypted partition at all.)
b) In a sane operating system, software installations that require administrator privileges should be sandboxed. I know mine are. (And no, I am not limited to a software repository that someone else has assembled. Many non-repository apps or fresh new versions are as easy as a Windows click-through installer, although the tricky ones can be quite a hassle.)