The core problem with psuedo-science is a lot of it is unfalsifiable.
And we definitely need to update our education to include that if something is unfalsifiable, then it should, for practical purposes, be considered false.
Apart from that the survey is very poorly worded for example the statement: "There are phenomena that physical science and the laws of nature cannot explain.". I could easily say "strongly agree" to that and think "dark matter" which is something that physical science cannot explain at the moment but which I'd hope we will eventually explain. So does the statement mean "cannot ever explain" or "cannot at the moment explain"?
This also jumped out at me. A few of these questions could definitely use a once-over from a linguist. There's a difference between "cannot" and "does not currently".
There are other examples in there where the correct answer is the closest approximation, but not the whole truth.
Back in the days, trolls had some basic intelligence and would understand that if they post the same bullshit to everything, readers will see through it and understand that it's the same guy, even if he's hiding behing Anonymous Coward.
Can we please get the old trolls back? I liked them better.
First, your number is false. It isn't even true for desktop systems anymore, and has never, ever, been true for servers. 94% my ass. The only place on the planet where 90+% of the servers run windows is the Microsoft headquarters and I'm not even sure of that. But no matter what, it's just completely irrelevant to this discussion anyways.
Second, you don't need an app to build a hosts file, it's plain text after all. Initial building is totally irrelevant, updating is what matters. Some machine somewhere that can do it is worthless. It needs to be a continuous process.
Third, why the fuck are you still arguing about the superiority of host files when that's not under discussion? What's your problem? Not getting enough attention?
You shut down me. What a joke. You don't even know who I am. But since I'm pretty sure your next reply will just be a third repetition of the same nonsense, and you don't even try to comprehend what I'm actually writing, I'm exiting this here.
I have no idea what you think you're arguing here. You don't need to explain hostfiles to me, I've patched kernels and maintained Apache modules, I think the difference is quite clear.
Still, any defense against ads needs to be kept current, and unless there's some kind of subscription service as exists with the adblockers, the method itself is pretty much useless.
Those were the words you quoted in your reply. I thought that was what we're talking about. To be more precise: An individual homepage is not commons. The Internet as a whole is. It's a shared medium that only exists due to its shared nature. All the Facebook servers would be worth their scrap value and nothing else if they weren't connected to the rest of the world.
If you had an interest in actually following my argument instead of arguing per se, the billboard metaphor would've pointed you in the right direction. Sure the billboard may stand on private property, but the visual space it pollutes is public. Nobody would put up a billboard on private ground if it weren't in a location where the public can see it.
If you think that "The Internet" is home pages then put your geek card into the container near the door on your way out.
For interested readers who want to learn what the parent missed in his education: "The Internet" is the thing between the "home pages". That's what the "Inter" part stands for.
Every time I hear of a story with insane odds and think just how impossible it is,
The thing is that we have human brains evolved to cope with everyday situations. We fail spectacularily at the very small and very large. We fail utterly and catastrophically when those two meet. "Black Swan" is a great book on that topic.
The thing with the highly improbably is the scale at which they happen. We have close to 7 billion people living on that planet. Which - in the words of Tim Minchin - means that one in a million chance events happen all the time.
Literally.
If something has a one in a million chance of happening in a lifetime, then it will happen to 7,000 people who are currently alive. Assuming 70 years life-expectancy (for simplicity and because it gives a nice round number) that means it happens 100 times every year, or roughly every 3-4 days.
That's counter-intuitive, isn't it? Globally speaking, "one in a million" events happen twice a week.
And "one in a million per year" events happen almost every hour.
The question then becomes; what is "acceptable advertising"?
Not to me, no. Advertisement is never acceptable in the ideal world. In the real world, the question makes no sense because reality is as it is, not as we want it to be.
I repeat: There is no acceptable advertisement. If we are talking about how we would like it to be then it would be 100% ad-free.
I've posted elsewhere about matching searches and offers. A categorized portal like site (or many) would replace advertisement. Ideally, you don't have to build a site but use meta-data and search engines can expand into that space. So I have a multiplayer political sandbox game. I add the appropriate meta-data to my site and search and index engines grab it from there and when someone looks for it, they can find it, among others. Ideally, there would be more than just those four keywords so searches can be refined. A semantic web could offer more.
So basically, in my ideal universe, there is no advertisement because you don't need(1) it. People who want your product can find it, and factual information wins over blink tags because the searches use the facts and are unimpressed by your flashing jumping monkey.
I want my computer to be able to give me a shortlist when I tell it that I'd like to play a nice FPS game tonight and either it goes by my past preferences or I can tell it some more about what I want. Search engines don't do that, because they don't yet understand what they see. But we have some progress in natural language understanding we could apply.
And I want a "give me something unusual" switch. Or a preference. You'd never discover new things otherwise. My preference would be to have every 5th item be something from outside my comfort zone and past preferences.
(1) of course, this ignores that marketing creates desires, too. That's part of why I consider it parasitical.
---
Do you see how far I am away from any discussion about "acceptable advertisement"? Really, the discussion about acceptable advertisement is to me the same as "acceptable racism" or "acceptable sexual abuse". I believe that just as we as a species are slowly growing out of that shit, we will also grow out of advertisement and see it as the psychological warfare on some of our scarcest mental resources that it is.
Don't take all this personal, but your case is just a good one to use for demonstration.
No offense taken. I understand dissonance better than most people, which is why I can live with myself having some. In fact, dissonance is beautiful in its own way.
Wow, you went off raging on a tangent there that wasn't even in the room.
"The Internet" is a commons. Facebook isn't and if it wants money then fine with me. This isn't about any right to advertise or some such bullshit, it's about how advertisement poisons everything. It can be perfectly legal and still toxic.
Public space is also a commons, I used the billboard example intentionally.
But I guess this is all a waste of time as you wanted to misunderstand me.
You assume simplicity where it suits you, and complexity likewise.
A > B is not a matter of objective, but of subjective fact. If X and Y trade A for B then it's because X values B higher than A and Y values A higher than B. There are many reasons why that's the case.
In this case, a database of a million people and their interests is worth quite a bit to an advertiser while a single bit of that data is pretty much worthless. So yes, Facebook can sell your personal data for more money than you could sell it for on your own.
The dishonesty in the system is in the "free" and in the misconception. If Facebook were a service where you can put your personal data so they can sell it and give you a share of the profit, I wouldn't mind. I wouldn't participate, but I wouldn't mind.
But when some advertiser pollutes my (in a tiny share) public space with his billboard, or when the entire Internet is turned into the shopping channel, then I do mind. Tragedy of the commons, public space, collateral damage, whatever you call it.
"Advertisers are parasites". That's an interesting choice of words. I guess you're unaware that advertisers pay the bills for this site and almost all sites on the internet.
I am aware of that and those two are not mutually exclusive. Sure I get something for free. If your definition of "free" is limited to the exchange of money. But money is not everything you have that has value. Your time and your attention are valuable too. And they are more valuable than the service that you get for them, because otherwise those inbetween could not make a profit on selling them to advertisers.
Never thought about it that way around, have you? Let me repeat that: There is no "free" in capitalism. You just pay in a different currency. Since people make a profit here, what they get from you and re-sell to someone else is worth more than what you're getting in return. The difference is the profit they make.
As I said elsewhere: I understand that people who offer a product or a service need to be able to get the word out. I would absolutely love to live in a world where every unsolicited commercial advertisement is illegal, including my footer here, and is replaced by a marketplace where people who offer something and people who look for something meet.
Reality, however, is that I don't live in that world. I still need to get word about what I offer out, because waiting for the perfect world first is the wrong order. So I do it in the least obtrusive way possible, with no flashing lights and false promises and tracking and stalking and IN YOUR FACE MOTHERFUCKER - a link and an implicit or explicit "maybe this is of interest to you".
The same way I'm a big fan of electric cars, but when I rent one next time, it'll probably not be an electric one simply because where I go when I need a car is usually outside the city and there won't be a charging station.
There's ideals and there's the real world. I pursue my ideals and I work for them, always have and always will. And here today, I live in the real world and do what works there. And sometimes those things are not identical. I can function in the real world while seing that there's a gap between it and the ideal world I want to live in. The right answer is working on making that gap smaller, not withdrawing into a fantas world.
I hope you're not exaggerating or being facetious.
I'm not if you read the whole sentence. It's a solution and the only one that I think will really work.
I don't want to Godwin the thread, but everything else is playing appeasement with Hitler. Sure, advertisers will accept your demands. For the moment. While they plan annecting the next small country. And piece by piece you give up everything.
What makes you believe such a culture has ever really existed in human culture on Earth?
It has existed in my lifetime. Yes, I'm over 20. But it's not been long that magazines cost money and so did music. Sure, we've always tried to get things cheaper or for free, but the expectation that that is a business model is quite recent.
Look at computer games, for example. Free2Play didn't exist 20 years ago. Free games were actually free, usually because they were someones hobby.
Slashdot Mirror
...
The core problem with psuedo-science is a lot of it is unfalsifiable.
And we definitely need to update our education to include that if something is unfalsifiable, then it should, for practical purposes, be considered false.
Apart from that the survey is very poorly worded for example the statement: "There are phenomena that physical science and the laws of nature cannot explain.". I could easily say "strongly agree" to that and think "dark matter" which is something that physical science cannot explain at the moment but which I'd hope we will eventually explain. So does the statement mean "cannot ever explain" or "cannot at the moment explain"?
This also jumped out at me. A few of these questions could definitely use a once-over from a linguist. There's a difference between "cannot" and "does not currently".
There are other examples in there where the correct answer is the closest approximation, but not the whole truth.
Back in the days, trolls had some basic intelligence and would understand that if they post the same bullshit to everything, readers will see through it and understand that it's the same guy, even if he's hiding behing Anonymous Coward.
Can we please get the old trolls back? I liked them better.
ok, I have to reply on one point here, because otherwise innocent readers are fooled:
Good luck building a hosts file minus repeats
# man uniq
The rest of his drivel - my condolences to everyone who actually read it.
I have a troll. :-)
Get a life, loser. Also, take reading comprehension 101.
omg, are you for real?
First, your number is false. It isn't even true for desktop systems anymore, and has never, ever, been true for servers. 94% my ass. The only place on the planet where 90+% of the servers run windows is the Microsoft headquarters and I'm not even sure of that. But no matter what, it's just completely irrelevant to this discussion anyways.
Second, you don't need an app to build a hosts file, it's plain text after all. Initial building is totally irrelevant, updating is what matters. Some machine somewhere that can do it is worthless. It needs to be a continuous process.
Third, why the fuck are you still arguing about the superiority of host files when that's not under discussion? What's your problem? Not getting enough attention?
You shut down me. What a joke. You don't even know who I am. But since I'm pretty sure your next reply will just be a third repetition of the same nonsense, and you don't even try to comprehend what I'm actually writing, I'm exiting this here.
Damn are there many idiot trolls on /. these days.
Are you even reading what I write?
That link you point to is a windows-only software, but I already wrote that like four replies ago. It's useless to me since I don't run windows.
The rest you wrote I don't care about and I have no idea why you even wrote it because it's got nothing to do with what we're discussing.
You're a nitwit who intentionally misunderstands things in order to troll. Goodbye.
I have no idea what you think you're arguing here. You don't need to explain hostfiles to me, I've patched kernels and maintained Apache modules, I think the difference is quite clear.
Still, any defense against ads needs to be kept current, and unless there's some kind of subscription service as exists with the adblockers, the method itself is pretty much useless.
My exact words were:
"The Internet" is a commons.
Those were the words you quoted in your reply. I thought that was what we're talking about. To be more precise: An individual homepage is not commons. The Internet as a whole is. It's a shared medium that only exists due to its shared nature. All the Facebook servers would be worth their scrap value and nothing else if they weren't connected to the rest of the world.
If you had an interest in actually following my argument instead of arguing per se, the billboard metaphor would've pointed you in the right direction. Sure the billboard may stand on private property, but the visual space it pollutes is public. Nobody would put up a billboard on private ground if it weren't in a location where the public can see it.
I'm talking statistics. You are talking individual events. Those two things are not in the same class of things.
what used to be called "home pages".
If you think that "The Internet" is home pages then put your geek card into the container near the door on your way out.
For interested readers who want to learn what the parent missed in his education: "The Internet" is the thing between the "home pages". That's what the "Inter" part stands for.
A hosts file yes, the update tool the GP posted, no.
Nothing static is acceptable, target is moving too much and I have better things to do with my time than keeping textfiles constantly updated.
Every time I hear of a story with insane odds and think just how impossible it is,
The thing is that we have human brains evolved to cope with everyday situations. We fail spectacularily at the very small and very large. We fail utterly and catastrophically when those two meet. "Black Swan" is a great book on that topic.
The thing with the highly improbably is the scale at which they happen. We have close to 7 billion people living on that planet. Which - in the words of Tim Minchin - means that one in a million chance events happen all the time.
Literally.
If something has a one in a million chance of happening in a lifetime, then it will happen to 7,000 people who are currently alive. Assuming 70 years life-expectancy (for simplicity and because it gives a nice round number) that means it happens 100 times every year, or roughly every 3-4 days.
That's counter-intuitive, isn't it? Globally speaking, "one in a million" events happen twice a week.
And "one in a million per year" events happen almost every hour.
The question then becomes; what is "acceptable advertising"?
Not to me, no. Advertisement is never acceptable in the ideal world. In the real world, the question makes no sense because reality is as it is, not as we want it to be.
I repeat: There is no acceptable advertisement. If we are talking about how we would like it to be then it would be 100% ad-free.
I've posted elsewhere about matching searches and offers. A categorized portal like site (or many) would replace advertisement. Ideally, you don't have to build a site but use meta-data and search engines can expand into that space. So I have a multiplayer political sandbox game. I add the appropriate meta-data to my site and search and index engines grab it from there and when someone looks for it, they can find it, among others. Ideally, there would be more than just those four keywords so searches can be refined. A semantic web could offer more.
So basically, in my ideal universe, there is no advertisement because you don't need(1) it. People who want your product can find it, and factual information wins over blink tags because the searches use the facts and are unimpressed by your flashing jumping monkey.
I want my computer to be able to give me a shortlist when I tell it that I'd like to play a nice FPS game tonight and either it goes by my past preferences or I can tell it some more about what I want. Search engines don't do that, because they don't yet understand what they see. But we have some progress in natural language understanding we could apply.
And I want a "give me something unusual" switch. Or a preference. You'd never discover new things otherwise. My preference would be to have every 5th item be something from outside my comfort zone and past preferences.
(1) of course, this ignores that marketing creates desires, too. That's part of why I consider it parasitical.
---
Do you see how far I am away from any discussion about "acceptable advertisement"? Really, the discussion about acceptable advertisement is to me the same as "acceptable racism" or "acceptable sexual abuse". I believe that just as we as a species are slowly growing out of that shit, we will also grow out of advertisement and see it as the psychological warfare on some of our scarcest mental resources that it is.
Don't take all this personal, but your case is just a good one to use for demonstration.
No offense taken. I understand dissonance better than most people, which is why I can live with myself having some. In fact, dissonance is beautiful in its own way.
Nobody owes you building free web sites for you.
Wow, you went off raging on a tangent there that wasn't even in the room.
"The Internet" is a commons. Facebook isn't and if it wants money then fine with me. This isn't about any right to advertise or some such bullshit, it's about how advertisement poisons everything. It can be perfectly legal and still toxic.
Public space is also a commons, I used the billboard example intentionally.
But I guess this is all a waste of time as you wanted to misunderstand me.
Yeah, but that crap is windoze-specific.
You assume simplicity where it suits you, and complexity likewise.
A > B is not a matter of objective, but of subjective fact. If X and Y trade A for B then it's because X values B higher than A and Y values A higher than B. There are many reasons why that's the case.
In this case, a database of a million people and their interests is worth quite a bit to an advertiser while a single bit of that data is pretty much worthless. So yes, Facebook can sell your personal data for more money than you could sell it for on your own.
The dishonesty in the system is in the "free" and in the misconception. If Facebook were a service where you can put your personal data so they can sell it and give you a share of the profit, I wouldn't mind. I wouldn't participate, but I wouldn't mind.
But when some advertiser pollutes my (in a tiny share) public space with his billboard, or when the entire Internet is turned into the shopping channel, then I do mind. Tragedy of the commons, public space, collateral damage, whatever you call it.
I don't mind them having a little of my time
I do. It's the only commidity I have that is strictly limited and that once I've given it away I can't get back.
"Advertisers are parasites". That's an interesting choice of words. I guess you're unaware that advertisers pay the bills for this site and almost all sites on the internet.
I am aware of that and those two are not mutually exclusive. Sure I get something for free. If your definition of "free" is limited to the exchange of money. But money is not everything you have that has value. Your time and your attention are valuable too. And they are more valuable than the service that you get for them, because otherwise those inbetween could not make a profit on selling them to advertisers.
Never thought about it that way around, have you? Let me repeat that: There is no "free" in capitalism. You just pay in a different currency. Since people make a profit here, what they get from you and re-sell to someone else is worth more than what you're getting in return. The difference is the profit they make.
As I said elsewhere: I understand that people who offer a product or a service need to be able to get the word out. I would absolutely love to live in a world where every unsolicited commercial advertisement is illegal, including my footer here, and is replaced by a marketplace where people who offer something and people who look for something meet.
Reality, however, is that I don't live in that world. I still need to get word about what I offer out, because waiting for the perfect world first is the wrong order. So I do it in the least obtrusive way possible, with no flashing lights and false promises and tracking and stalking and IN YOUR FACE MOTHERFUCKER - a link and an implicit or explicit "maybe this is of interest to you".
The same way I'm a big fan of electric cars, but when I rent one next time, it'll probably not be an electric one simply because where I go when I need a car is usually outside the city and there won't be a charging station.
There's ideals and there's the real world. I pursue my ideals and I work for them, always have and always will. And here today, I live in the real world and do what works there. And sometimes those things are not identical. I can function in the real world while seing that there's a gap between it and the ideal world I want to live in. The right answer is working on making that gap smaller, not withdrawing into a fantas world.
I hope you're not exaggerating or being facetious.
I'm not if you read the whole sentence. It's a solution and the only one that I think will really work.
I don't want to Godwin the thread, but everything else is playing appeasement with Hitler. Sure, advertisers will accept your demands. For the moment. While they plan annecting the next small country. And piece by piece you give up everything.
That's actually a really good argument, best one I've heard so far.
What makes you believe such a culture has ever really existed in human culture on Earth?
It has existed in my lifetime. Yes, I'm over 20. But it's not been long that magazines cost money and so did music. Sure, we've always tried to get things cheaper or for free, but the expectation that that is a business model is quite recent.
Look at computer games, for example. Free2Play didn't exist 20 years ago. Free games were actually free, usually because they were someones hobby.