People will probably laugh at the idea, but... once we have bionic enhancements superior to what evolution came up with, it will probably be cheaper to raise monkeys and fit them with the enhancements and dump them loose on the enemy, than to hire human soldiers. Remember, humans will require more and more to put their lives on the line, while monkeys and manufacturing will just get cheaper...
That's way too optimistic. Remember, the relative size of the baby-boomer voting bloc will go up (and has been going up) before they die off. The population is aging. The AARP and its cohort (yeah yeah, pun not intended...) will defeat any reduction in benefits today. It's only going to get harder over the next twenty years.
If the benefits do get cut, it will be in a very roundabout, scorched-earth way. My bet? Inflate the hell out of the currency and then lie about prices. (That is, an amped up version of what they do now.) "Oh, see, we still pay you $3000/month to adjust for cost of living... so what if a candy bar is $20 now? Our expertly-gathered stats PROVE that our benefit payments have kept up with inflation, granny."
That will hurt the rest of the population too, unless of course interest rates become remotely realistic before then. Younger workers will probably not mind 15% inflation as much if risk-free short-term interest rates weren't stuck at 2%:-P
It's not the FCC job to regulate anything other than over-the-air radio waves (public property). Software, not being radio, is private and NONE of the government's long-nosed business.
Good job. He said FCC (Federal Communications Commission) when he should have said FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and instead of reminding the rest of us what the relevant government agency would be, you took the opportunity to grandstand about his mistake. That really helps the discussion, doesn't it?
Anyway, I have a hard time seeing how this would be overstepping the government's bounds. It's just setting up a template people are free to use, or not, or use with modifications. Government-endorsed behavior (where it pays people to do something), is not the same thing as government-recognized behavior (where it sets a template to ease communication).
The worst that would happen is that it biases people into not trusting those who refuse to simplify their TOS into one of the common templates. Good. People should have distrusted long license agreements in the first place. It's the general tolerance of that kind of BS that has pushed people into accepting as commonplace the atrocious practice of agreeing to something you haven't read... something that in any other context is evidence of coercion.
But the doctrine of fair use also implies the purpose for which the parts are used. You can quote parts of a work, for instance, to make a criticism, but not to create a full copy of the original work.
That looks like a distinction without a difference. Here's an easy workaround:
1) Everyone participating hosts their 30 seconds, such that in total, the whole work is represented. 2) Some automated script comes up with an essay criticizing the work, which includes that clip, appropriately metatagged. Sharer signs off as endorsing that essay. 3) People come to the site to "read criticisms" of the work. 4) Once they've downloaded all the criticisms, software on their home PC (aided by the metatags) puts the work back together so they can use it.
That way, everyone using it has a fair use defense (nobody's contribution by itself infringes on the market for the work), but if someone were to read all "criticisms", they have the whole work.
Then what rule do you tag on to make that illegal? Make people have to go to multiple sites to get all the "essays"? Have an inspector judge whether you "really mean" the criticism presented in your essay? Ban such "splicer" programs? Prohibit people from telling the exact location within the work of the clip they're using(!)? Give someone the arbitrary authority to rule something "obviously an attempt to get around Fair Use"?
Thank you for your reply. But I think we're talking past each other.
I'm not saying that someone should be excluded from the Nobel Prize because of their religious beliefs. (Note I didn't even mention Penrose's religion or the religious aspects of his theory!) I'm saying they should be excluded when a) they promote that relgious belief *as science*, and do it b) in preference to numerous theories for which there is significantly stronger evidence.
So it wouldn't exclude Einstein: despite the metaphorical "God" reference, what he was saying was really, "We should have a strong preference for determinism in positing theories of natural phenomena." And the evidence did justify that preference at the time! And even when he was reluctant to change his mind, he was favoring the second most likely theory, not the 50th, which is what Penrose is doing.
In Newton's case, the level of knowledge at the time did not suffice to reject certain low-level religious beliefs, meaning they could reasonably stick with certain religious "priors". That is, if people have historically lived successful lives based on a religious "theory", it's not unscientific to accept that until counterevidence comes in -- which in Newton's day, it hadn't, or would have required a lot of intelligence to see. What Penrose is doing, in contrast, is saying *after* the evidence comes in, that he's going to reject the top 50 most likely theories for the one below it. Also, Newton never made those religious beliefs a fundamental, defining part of the theories, as others at the time (Descartes I think) pressured him to. He said, F=Gmm/r^2, not "F=Gmm/r^2 as per Psalm 15".
So, in short, I'm not saying, "exclude religious people from the Nobel Prize"; I'm saying, "exclude people from the Nobel Prize who try to promote, as science, very weak theories over numerous more deserving ones."
I'm going to have to disagree. I know this sounds trollish, but I'm really not trying to start a flamewar, and I ask that you keep it civil in telling me how wrong I am. Here goes:
Whatever the greatness of Penrose's discovery, he threw it all away when he started advocating the quantum gravity theory of uncomputable physics as the basis for creativity. Right or wrong, he's advocating a theory which a) does not have enough evidence to come anywhere close to favoring it over more deserving theories, and b) was chosen so that it would be lots of work to falsify.
Scientists should hold themselves to a higher standard than the "principle of Epicurus", i.e. accept all hypotheses not yet falsified. They shoud believe whatever the evidence reveals to have the *highest* probability, not just pick their personal favorite theory that hasn't specifically been ruled out yet. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, the fact that the map is blurry does not give you the right fill in streets wherever you feel like.
Is it going too far to count his unscientific theory against his previous successes? No. Scientific committees need to consider not just the immediate, but also the long-term consequences of giving their endorsement to individuals. While they should give out degrees to people who like to hold unscientific beliefs in their spare time, they should not hold them out as shining examples of "someone doing it right".
Good point. Breaking the Turing test would be like if you had the human contestant be a teenage girl and conducted it over text-messaging.
Examiner: Okay, tell me your name. Contestant #1: omlk4rl? Examiner: hah! Not only did this program give itself away on the FIRST RESPONSE, it spit out some kind of 64-bit memory dump! Supervisor: Sir, that was the human. Examiner: !!!
It's baffling that someone with that kind of talent would be working for spammers instead of in a tenured university position.
Not when you consider how much professors make vs. how much spammers who can beat captchas can make. Hint: if you find a quick way to factor semiprimes, don't snag $1 million from the Clay Institute. Reap $1 billion from credit cards. If you can easily toss aside ethics.
Incidentally, I was just reading Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, where he goes in great depth talking about the difficulty of defining the letter "A", and how people are capable of recognizing A's in truly bizarre fonts. (And how it carries over to native readers of Chinese and defining Chinese characters.) He pursuasively argues that ability to recognize any 'A', including all the bizarre fonts with 'A' is AI-complete (though of course he didn't use that term). So it seems there's quite a ways to go in making captchas harder: don't just distort the image; use the craziest fonts you can.
All Goedel proved was that there exist true statements that it can't prove. There are still many theorems it can prove. And the theorems it can't prove are all stuff like, "This statement cannot be proven."
Show of hands: Who here cares about the software's inability to generate theorems like that? Anyone? Didn't think so.
The break-even point would immediately change to about 2 years if people had to actually (gasp!) pay for the damage their carbon emissions produce, or carbon emissions were capped at the level necessary to avert catastrophe.
Just because you're not paying a cost, doesn't mean no one is.
Yes, it does sound idiotic. My reaction was: ROFLcopter at the idea that you can successfully "tell people to act suspicious". Um, if it were possible in the first place for people to notice and control the aspects of themselves that make them look suspicious, others wouldn't be suspicious of those aspects in the first place!
Think about it: people become suspicious of others based on criteria X,Y,Z because meeting X,Y,Z reveals a higher probability of intent to cause harm. But anybody trying to cause harm will suppress any *controllable* sign that they are trying to cause harm before it's too late to stop. So the only remaining criteria people use in dermining whether they'll be suspicious of someone are those that are very difficult if not impossible to control. As a bad example: someone will only look around to see if he's being watched (which looks suspicious), if he's about to do something objectionable (like picking a lock). But he can't suppress that because then he takes the chance of someone noticing him picking the lock.
A better test would be to set up a scenario like a line at the airport where the screeners have to keep out dangerous items. Then, have a few of the participants try to smuggle items through, and get a huge reward if they succeed, while the screeners get the reward if smugglers don't succeed. Then, put a time limit on, so the screeners have to be judicious about who they check, so they only check the most suspicious. Oh, and make it double-blind as much as possible. Then, the people trying to smuggle will have the same incentive structure that real smugglers have, and thus will give off all the real-world signs of planning something objectionable.
Naive response: The Wikipedia article claims that once you have one space elevator, building a second becomes significantly cheaper. If the first one costs anywhere near $5 billion, then you could just build several others once you have the first, scatter them across parts of the equator that are weather-wise safer, and just accept that you'll lose one every few 5-20 years(and give a nice long string of nanotubes to whoever it lands on!).
I'm skeptical of that. It's Nielsen's extensive use of extremely questionable surveying methods that causes Firefly's viewers to be undercounted in the first place. Few people in the Firefly demographic actually respond to Nielsen's phone surveys, and those who do are *not* representative of that demographic.
The sooner they abandon such junk statistics, the better. Why not have the cable companies just pass on their aggregate statistics, and satellite TV, the info on the descrambler?
And one great way (mentioned in the links) is to kill yourself, and see if that merely excludes from your observation any world in which you'd be dead.
I guess I didn't explain my idea very well. (Really, it was poorly phrased.) I wasn't saying that those mortgages labled "dangerous" should be banned; rather, that would just trigger the requirement that you have to get approval, which takes three weeks, which I know is longer than the home-buying process. They would still be allowed, they would just have a psychological barrier that normal mortgages don't. Remember, the approval is guaranteed, it's just there to nudge you away, not stop you entirely if you know what you're doing. Peace out.
According to Michelle Malkin's site that someone linked above, it wasn't guessing a password, but using the "forgot your password" feature and then being able to guess one of the questions.
Just serves as a reminder that your webmail account is only as secure as its weakest point.
they were misled.... dumb people do not DESERVE to be taken advantage of by smart people.
But I still should point out that:
-Any taken-advantage-of borrower requires an even-more-taken-advantage-of lender. The borrower gets to walk away, at least having a gained some time in a home they shouldn't have moved into, while the lender suffers a huge loss. (Of course what actually happened here was the immediate lender, a broker, pocketed a huge gain and dumped it on other investors.) -The problems were by and large not with the fine print. They were problems like, "I didn't know that adjustable rate mortgages adjust" and "I can't actually afford the monthly payments".
Btw, I think a large part of the problem could have been avoided with a very light regulation: label as "dangerous" any mortgage other than a fixed rate, 20% down, 30-year, fully-amortizing, non-recourse, no-prepayment penalty. Then, require it to be authorize by a rubber-stamp government agency that approves everything it gets, but after taking three weeks to get back to you. That adds a huge psychological barrier to non-savvy buyers, effectively steering them away from unsafe mortgages, while not making much of a difference to people who know what they're doing.
Thank you! Finally someone injects some common sense into this! That was the best explanation I've seen of that very frequent fallacy. If my mod points hadn't expired, I would have modded you up.
You should add:
Martin Luther: You know, I don't quite agree with the doctrines of the pope, I think peole should stop following them. You (20 generations ago): But that's illegal!
Notice how the same people that make that argument about illegal immigrants,
a) selectively decide which laws are okay to break (e.g. speeding, inappropriate touching of an office appliance) b) don't suddenly rescind their objections when all immigration laws are repealed.
Of course, remember that there are defenensible reasons for restricting immigration, but they amount to more than "it's illegal".
Advertising it "just works" means people will go out of their way to prove it doesn't.
Um, I have two words for you: No.
In my experience, Apple rarely gets it right, even when *I* go out of my way to make it work. For example, using the help feature. I tried to add a.flac track to iTunes, and it didn't work. Okay, so I need to check which file types are allowed on iTunes and iPods. So I use their help feature, and search for every possible combination of words that would call up that information, and every time got no results. Try it for yourself!
How the hell can you make a help feature so unhelpful?
Same problem for repositioning the titles on an iMovie project. No combination of words calls up the answer and you eventually have to google it, only to find other people trying to figure it out themselves. Apple's motto seems to be "help feature? Um, go google it yourself, bro, ain't our problem."
Another example: extracting stills from a movie I made in iMovie. Should be a simple, basic feature, right? Well, using the "help" feature, the only way I could see to do it was to add that still as a clip to the project, and then save it, and then delete it, and then manually move the still from the depths of hell in Finder to where I actually want it.
When I complained about this to Mac fanboys, I got a lecture about how I shouldn't complain until I learn the Mac way of doing things. Upon closer examination, the method I already tried was the Mac way, and then I got rationalizations about how, oh, I really should use the PAY software for such ultra-advanced functionality, and how, oh, COME on, it's not THAT big of an unnecessary hassle.
Yeah, you heard that right: in the GOLD STANDARD of user interface design, how *dare* I complain about tedious, unnecessary steps. I probably wouldn't complain so much except for people claiming Apple's good at interface design when it's so clearly not.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the short version of what you described, seems to be that the result is:
-Government monopolies, and all the corruption and inefficiency that involves. -Mandating companies to provide services they otherwise wouldn't, and get a haphazardly-calculated amount of money to do so, and all the corruption and inefficiency that involves.
And then, the tremendous benefit the community gets by reluctantly going along with these necessary evils is... what again? Oh, right: people who chose to live very far out, get to have the service at well below the cost of providing it that far out.
Pardon me if I think that's a bit of a stupid tradeoff.
Slashdot Mirror
People will probably laugh at the idea, but ... once we have bionic enhancements superior to what evolution came up with, it will probably be cheaper to raise monkeys and fit them with the enhancements and dump them loose on the enemy, than to hire human soldiers. Remember, humans will require more and more to put their lives on the line, while monkeys and manufacturing will just get cheaper...
And if the web site is a discussion forum, you're exactly what they're trying to keep out.
That's way too optimistic. Remember, the relative size of the baby-boomer voting bloc will go up (and has been going up) before they die off. The population is aging. The AARP and its cohort (yeah yeah, pun not intended...) will defeat any reduction in benefits today. It's only going to get harder over the next twenty years.
If the benefits do get cut, it will be in a very roundabout, scorched-earth way. My bet? Inflate the hell out of the currency and then lie about prices. (That is, an amped up version of what they do now.) "Oh, see, we still pay you $3000/month to adjust for cost of living... so what if a candy bar is $20 now? Our expertly-gathered stats PROVE that our benefit payments have kept up with inflation, granny."
That will hurt the rest of the population too, unless of course interest rates become remotely realistic before then. Younger workers will probably not mind 15% inflation as much if risk-free short-term interest rates weren't stuck at 2% :-P
It's not the FCC job to regulate anything other than over-the-air radio waves (public property).
Software, not being radio, is private and NONE of the government's long-nosed business.
Good job. He said FCC (Federal Communications Commission) when he should have said FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and instead of reminding the rest of us what the relevant government agency would be, you took the opportunity to grandstand about his mistake. That really helps the discussion, doesn't it?
Anyway, I have a hard time seeing how this would be overstepping the government's bounds. It's just setting up a template people are free to use, or not, or use with modifications. Government-endorsed behavior (where it pays people to do something), is not the same thing as government-recognized behavior (where it sets a template to ease communication).
The worst that would happen is that it biases people into not trusting those who refuse to simplify their TOS into one of the common templates. Good. People should have distrusted long license agreements in the first place. It's the general tolerance of that kind of BS that has pushed people into accepting as commonplace the atrocious practice of agreeing to something you haven't read ... something that in any other context is evidence of coercion.
Will anyone remembered what happened the last time we will allowed Cyberdyne to make anything remotely robotic?
There, fixed that for you. Geez, won't they taught time-travel grammar anybefore?
But the doctrine of fair use also implies the purpose for which the parts are used. You can quote parts of a work, for instance, to make a criticism, but not to create a full copy of the original work.
That looks like a distinction without a difference. Here's an easy workaround:
1) Everyone participating hosts their 30 seconds, such that in total, the whole work is represented.
2) Some automated script comes up with an essay criticizing the work, which includes that clip, appropriately metatagged. Sharer signs off as endorsing that essay.
3) People come to the site to "read criticisms" of the work.
4) Once they've downloaded all the criticisms, software on their home PC (aided by the metatags) puts the work back together so they can use it.
That way, everyone using it has a fair use defense (nobody's contribution by itself infringes on the market for the work), but if someone were to read all "criticisms", they have the whole work.
Then what rule do you tag on to make that illegal? Make people have to go to multiple sites to get all the "essays"? Have an inspector judge whether you "really mean" the criticism presented in your essay? Ban such "splicer" programs? Prohibit people from telling the exact location within the work of the clip they're using(!)? Give someone the arbitrary authority to rule something "obviously an attempt to get around Fair Use"?
Thank you for your reply. But I think we're talking past each other.
I'm not saying that someone should be excluded from the Nobel Prize because of their religious beliefs. (Note I didn't even mention Penrose's religion or the religious aspects of his theory!) I'm saying they should be excluded when a) they promote that relgious belief *as science*, and do it b) in preference to numerous theories for which there is significantly stronger evidence.
So it wouldn't exclude Einstein: despite the metaphorical "God" reference, what he was saying was really, "We should have a strong preference for determinism in positing theories of natural phenomena." And the evidence did justify that preference at the time! And even when he was reluctant to change his mind, he was favoring the second most likely theory, not the 50th, which is what Penrose is doing.
In Newton's case, the level of knowledge at the time did not suffice to reject certain low-level religious beliefs, meaning they could reasonably stick with certain religious "priors". That is, if people have historically lived successful lives based on a religious "theory", it's not unscientific to accept that until counterevidence comes in -- which in Newton's day, it hadn't, or would have required a lot of intelligence to see. What Penrose is doing, in contrast, is saying *after* the evidence comes in, that he's going to reject the top 50 most likely theories for the one below it. Also, Newton never made those religious beliefs a fundamental, defining part of the theories, as others at the time (Descartes I think) pressured him to. He said, F=Gmm/r^2, not "F=Gmm/r^2 as per Psalm 15".
So, in short, I'm not saying, "exclude religious people from the Nobel Prize"; I'm saying, "exclude people from the Nobel Prize who try to promote, as science, very weak theories over numerous more deserving ones."
I'm going to have to disagree. I know this sounds trollish, but I'm really not trying to start a flamewar, and I ask that you keep it civil in telling me how wrong I am. Here goes:
Whatever the greatness of Penrose's discovery, he threw it all away when he started advocating the quantum gravity theory of uncomputable physics as the basis for creativity. Right or wrong, he's advocating a theory which a) does not have enough evidence to come anywhere close to favoring it over more deserving theories, and b) was chosen so that it would be lots of work to falsify.
Scientists should hold themselves to a higher standard than the "principle of Epicurus", i.e. accept all hypotheses not yet falsified. They shoud believe whatever the evidence reveals to have the *highest* probability, not just pick their personal favorite theory that hasn't specifically been ruled out yet. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, the fact that the map is blurry does not give you the right fill in streets wherever you feel like.
Is it going too far to count his unscientific theory against his previous successes? No. Scientific committees need to consider not just the immediate, but also the long-term consequences of giving their endorsement to individuals. While they should give out degrees to people who like to hold unscientific beliefs in their spare time, they should not hold them out as shining examples of "someone doing it right".
Good point. Breaking the Turing test would be like if you had the human contestant be a teenage girl and conducted it over text-messaging.
Examiner: Okay, tell me your name.
Contestant #1: omlk4rl?
Examiner: hah! Not only did this program give itself away on the FIRST RESPONSE, it spit out some kind of 64-bit memory dump!
Supervisor: Sir, that was the human.
Examiner: !!!
It's baffling that someone with that kind of talent would be working for spammers instead of in a tenured university position.
Not when you consider how much professors make vs. how much spammers who can beat captchas can make. Hint: if you find a quick way to factor semiprimes, don't snag $1 million from the Clay Institute. Reap $1 billion from credit cards. If you can easily toss aside ethics.
Incidentally, I was just reading Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, where he goes in great depth talking about the difficulty of defining the letter "A", and how people are capable of recognizing A's in truly bizarre fonts. (And how it carries over to native readers of Chinese and defining Chinese characters.) He pursuasively argues that ability to recognize any 'A', including all the bizarre fonts with 'A' is AI-complete (though of course he didn't use that term). So it seems there's quite a ways to go in making captchas harder: don't just distort the image; use the craziest fonts you can.
All Goedel proved was that there exist true statements that it can't prove. There are still many theorems it can prove. And the theorems it can't prove are all stuff like, "This statement cannot be proven."
Show of hands: Who here cares about the software's inability to generate theorems like that? Anyone? Didn't think so.
The break-even point would immediately change to about 2 years if people had to actually (gasp!) pay for the damage their carbon emissions produce, or carbon emissions were capped at the level necessary to avert catastrophe.
Just because you're not paying a cost, doesn't mean no one is.
I guess InTrade wasn't good enough?
Yes, it does sound idiotic. My reaction was: ROFLcopter at the idea that you can successfully "tell people to act suspicious". Um, if it were possible in the first place for people to notice and control the aspects of themselves that make them look suspicious, others wouldn't be suspicious of those aspects in the first place!
Think about it: people become suspicious of others based on criteria X,Y,Z because meeting X,Y,Z reveals a higher probability of intent to cause harm. But anybody trying to cause harm will suppress any *controllable* sign that they are trying to cause harm before it's too late to stop. So the only remaining criteria people use in dermining whether they'll be suspicious of someone are those that are very difficult if not impossible to control. As a bad example: someone will only look around to see if he's being watched (which looks suspicious), if he's about to do something objectionable (like picking a lock). But he can't suppress that because then he takes the chance of someone noticing him picking the lock.
A better test would be to set up a scenario like a line at the airport where the screeners have to keep out dangerous items. Then, have a few of the participants try to smuggle items through, and get a huge reward if they succeed, while the screeners get the reward if smugglers don't succeed. Then, put a time limit on, so the screeners have to be judicious about who they check, so they only check the most suspicious. Oh, and make it double-blind as much as possible. Then, the people trying to smuggle will have the same incentive structure that real smugglers have, and thus will give off all the real-world signs of planning something objectionable.
But then, that would be too much work.
Naive response: The Wikipedia article claims that once you have one space elevator, building a second becomes significantly cheaper. If the first one costs anywhere near $5 billion, then you could just build several others once you have the first, scatter them across parts of the equator that are weather-wise safer, and just accept that you'll lose one every few 5-20 years(and give a nice long string of nanotubes to whoever it lands on!).
I'm skeptical of that. It's Nielsen's extensive use of extremely questionable surveying methods that causes Firefly's viewers to be undercounted in the first place. Few people in the Firefly demographic actually respond to Nielsen's phone surveys, and those who do are *not* representative of that demographic.
The sooner they abandon such junk statistics, the better. Why not have the cable companies just pass on their aggregate statistics, and satellite TV, the info on the descrambler?
And one great way (mentioned in the links) is to kill yourself, and see if that merely excludes from your observation any world in which you'd be dead.
Hey, just puttin' it out there.
I guess I didn't explain my idea very well. (Really, it was poorly phrased.) I wasn't saying that those mortgages labled "dangerous" should be banned; rather, that would just trigger the requirement that you have to get approval, which takes three weeks, which I know is longer than the home-buying process. They would still be allowed, they would just have a psychological barrier that normal mortgages don't. Remember, the approval is guaranteed, it's just there to nudge you away, not stop you entirely if you know what you're doing. Peace out.
According to Michelle Malkin's site that someone linked above, it wasn't guessing a password, but using the "forgot your password" feature and then being able to guess one of the questions.
Just serves as a reminder that your webmail account is only as secure as its weakest point.
What's worse, I found some strong evidence that phanboy_iv won't actually place any such wager. zomg!
I agree with your general point:
they were misled. ... dumb people do not DESERVE to be taken advantage of by smart people.
But I still should point out that:
-Any taken-advantage-of borrower requires an even-more-taken-advantage-of lender. The borrower gets to walk away, at least having a gained some time in a home they shouldn't have moved into, while the lender suffers a huge loss. (Of course what actually happened here was the immediate lender, a broker, pocketed a huge gain and dumped it on other investors.)
-The problems were by and large not with the fine print. They were problems like, "I didn't know that adjustable rate mortgages adjust" and "I can't actually afford the monthly payments".
Btw, I think a large part of the problem could have been avoided with a very light regulation: label as "dangerous" any mortgage other than a fixed rate, 20% down, 30-year, fully-amortizing, non-recourse, no-prepayment penalty. Then, require it to be authorize by a rubber-stamp government agency that approves everything it gets, but after taking three weeks to get back to you. That adds a huge psychological barrier to non-savvy buyers, effectively steering them away from unsafe mortgages, while not making much of a difference to people who know what they're doing.
Thank you! Finally someone injects some common sense into this! That was the best explanation I've seen of that very frequent fallacy. If my mod points hadn't expired, I would have modded you up.
You should add:
Martin Luther: You know, I don't quite agree with the doctrines of the pope, I think peole should stop following them.
You (20 generations ago): But that's illegal!
Notice how the same people that make that argument about illegal immigrants,
a) selectively decide which laws are okay to break (e.g. speeding, inappropriate touching of an office appliance)
b) don't suddenly rescind their objections when all immigration laws are repealed.
Of course, remember that there are defenensible reasons for restricting immigration, but they amount to more than "it's illegal".
Interestingly, General Motors has done the opposite: paid their best employees to work for someone else.
Advertising it "just works" means people will go out of their way to prove it doesn't.
Um, I have two words for you: No.
In my experience, Apple rarely gets it right, even when *I* go out of my way to make it work. For example, using the help feature. I tried to add a .flac track to iTunes, and it didn't work. Okay, so I need to check which file types are allowed on iTunes and iPods. So I use their help feature, and search for every possible combination of words that would call up that information, and every time got no results. Try it for yourself!
How the hell can you make a help feature so unhelpful?
Same problem for repositioning the titles on an iMovie project. No combination of words calls up the answer and you eventually have to google it, only to find other people trying to figure it out themselves. Apple's motto seems to be "help feature? Um, go google it yourself, bro, ain't our problem."
Another example: extracting stills from a movie I made in iMovie. Should be a simple, basic feature, right? Well, using the "help" feature, the only way I could see to do it was to add that still as a clip to the project, and then save it, and then delete it, and then manually move the still from the depths of hell in Finder to where I actually want it.
When I complained about this to Mac fanboys, I got a lecture about how I shouldn't complain until I learn the Mac way of doing things. Upon closer examination, the method I already tried was the Mac way, and then I got rationalizations about how, oh, I really should use the PAY software for such ultra-advanced functionality, and how, oh, COME on, it's not THAT big of an unnecessary hassle.
Yeah, you heard that right: in the GOLD STANDARD of user interface design, how *dare* I complain about tedious, unnecessary steps. I probably wouldn't complain so much except for people claiming Apple's good at interface design when it's so clearly not.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the short version of what you described, seems to be that the result is:
-Government monopolies, and all the corruption and inefficiency that involves.
-Mandating companies to provide services they otherwise wouldn't, and get a haphazardly-calculated amount of money to do so, and all the corruption and inefficiency that involves.
And then, the tremendous benefit the community gets by reluctantly going along with these necessary evils is ... what again? Oh, right: people who chose to live very far out, get to have the service at well below the cost of providing it that far out.
Pardon me if I think that's a bit of a stupid tradeoff.