Sounds like "realistic expectations" to me. Another comment from a similar colleague: Arranged marriages (at the level his family expected) were more like business partnerships put together by VCs. The families and/or their agents/matchmakers were looking for good combinations who would not have met by chance - even if they went to the same school or trade show (if only because genders are carefully polite in their culture).
TV shows are not made to entertain people. They are made to gather people in front of a particular station, at a particular time, so that they become an "audience" (perhaps with a particular "demographic"), during which time the station SELLS YOUR EYEBALLS to advertisers. The "scarcity" model is not artificial; it is a crucial component of maintaining the novelty of the show so that it can be used as bait again to gather more eyeballs for more advertisements.
Once something is available on DVD (or, now, for streaming), it is automatically less valuable for re-runs, because everyone who wants to see it has already had the ability to see it whenever they want, instead of the once-a-year that "seasonal favorites" were released when I was a kid (and you HAD to be in front of the TV when it was on, because there was no home VCR to time-shift it). (Disney manages to suppress their content for years between releases, making scarcity itself a product.) Plus the producers cannot sell new advertisements; they had to make one-time deals even for "coming attractions" on the disk (out-of-date within a year, and therefore often of value only to the same producer), and certainly had to make a one-time deal for the cost of selling the material in physical form. No wonder they prefer the pay-per-view jukebox model.
Remember: In the video industry, if you can't see the product they are selling, it's YOU.
Ummm . . . this is true. I was thinking of the degree of reaction once the fabrications were discovered, as contrasted with the total lack of retraction or correction for total nonsense that happens today. Your point that he *did* get away with it for a long time sort of casts a pall on that.
Jacob and his sons identified themselves to Pharaoh as shepherds, and earlier Jacob bred goats specifically for the coloration that was part of his deal with Laban. Our biblical forefathers understood about "selection" and "breeding for traits". The idea that natural circumstances are as much a "selection" as human choice is not much of a stretch.
Phenomenology suggests that the entire universe is merely a figment of my imagination, conjured up from the tiny amount of input I appear to have from "eyes" and "ears". Besides, why would I want to believe in, much less worship, a deity who treats his creations with all of the kindness and care of a temper-tantruming-two-year-old?
"Yellow journalism" was about politically and socially slanted news with a deliberate intent. OP is talking about people just plain getting things wrong and nobody caring.
The Wall Street Journal is pro-business. Well, yeah, it's *named* for the center of financial business, so it's *honestly* presenting a particular editorial viewpoint. One can accept and work with that. The problem is taking every rumor and first report and rebroadcasting them as "fact". History - like, a few hours later - may well explain why people got things wrong at first impression, and nobody can blame first reporters for having a narrow local perspective on whatever they can see from where they happen to be standing, and those first reports may well be crucial in rousing an alarm; but wrong is wrong, and "alarm reports" are not what news organizations used to mean by "reports from the scene" or "facts on the ground".
This is not at all suggesting we should ignore crowdsourced information. Without dashcams and other random sources, we would have missed video of asteroids and air crashes and all sorts of news. But openness to accepting information from more sources needs *more* editing and selectivity, not less, because of the lowered average quality and reliability.
Re:A natural reaction to Faux News i think
on
The Rise of Hoax News
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Not fair. You asked for proof that things used to be better, that people used to care more about accuracy, and you were answered. It is *sad* that the examples are from a decade or more ago.
OTOH Physical attack just takes a few hotheads with more machismo than brains. Biological or chemical attack in a crowded mall or transportation hub would be fairly simple. "Just blowing something up" and "limited damage" could still pull down the power grid.
Perhaps the important point is that it doesn't take much "real" effort to damage infrastructure and cause trouble, or even death and destruction. And it doesn't even take guns; derailing a train should only take a bunch of bricks and the quick-drying cement you patch steps with, if you know the line isn't busy for a few hours.
In the simplest example, one would think that power stations would have communications online constantly and someone would notice when they were cut (though emptying a few magazines into high voltage equipment probably takes less time than the police do).
People argue about pennies spent on school lunches, but can't be bothered to track millions spent on surveillance? Numerous cities, especially New York, have demonstrated that contemporaneous analysis of data, and general analysis of trends and patterns, can make a big difference in incidents. (We all think tech is cool in a Tom Clancy novel, or a military operation; why not for police?)
I know that an internal combustion engine works by exploding gas in the cylinders and pistoning the camshaft yadda yadda. This does not help at all, and is in fact a useless distraction, during the normal task of driving back and forth to work. It also does not help with the normal maintenance of checking the oil and topping off the windshield washer fluid. 90% of what 90% of programmers do similarly doesn't need the under-the-hood stuff. BTW I do embedded systems programming, where EVERYTHING matters . . . except that I'd rather use an RTOS than hand-code every single thing every single f'ing time, and concentrate my efforts on the new hardware and special control rather than the same old menu crap I've done dozens of times before.
I think it's more of the "Big Lie" technique as defined by Goebbels. Keep asserting something long enough, however outlandish, and eventually people will be telling each other, "Oh, I know it's true, I heard it on the news or something".
Did RSA take $10 million from the NSA and if so for what service?
Sounds like the leadin to an old joke . .. She: What kind of woman do you think I am?
He: We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price.
They should have said: "Hey, it's $10 million bucks, what would you have done?"
I'll go further on that: "It's $10 million bucks from our own government's black program who could put us out of business or have us convicted of something." This might have been an offer they couldn't safely refuse - and it's *supposedly* from the *good* guys.
Consider how often, in book and film and TV, our heroes just "suit up and go for a walk". No big deal, just get dressed. From Robert Heinlein's scenes of combat suited soldiers preparing for a drop in "Starship Troopers", more like cleaning their wiper blades than tuning up their car; Space Hulk terminator armor through lots of movies since, suits aren't much more inconvenient, and mecha - hah! just hop in the chair, click on the four-points, and drive away.
Yet in real life we have seen that even enclosed pilot flight gear needs more complexity, and the balloon jump within the atmosphere wasn't exactly simple. The comfort we normal passengers experience on an airplane, with shirtsleeve environment and acceptable noise level, shows just how much detail has been considered by others - and the fact that we ride in calm equanimity shows how little we consider those 1 in a million events like a rock being in the way.
Vitamins were being pushed strongly when I was a kid. Since they typically were extracts and concentrates of food products, they are regulated by the FOOD regulators rather than the DRUG regulators. As the pendulum swung to finding "natural" cures for everything - a modern herbalism - the drug companies kept trying to control the business by arguing first that vitamins are useless (and only "drugs" are useful), then that vitamins should be regulated as drugs (which of course they are the most experienced at controlling), then that they are of inconsistent quality (unfortunately true, but better quality control is a good concept for drugs *or* food), and now again that they are useless.
Maybe average-quality inconsistent multivitamins really are not as useful as hoped. Maybe all of the research pro-vitamin was wrong. Or, more likely, JUST LIKE DRUG RESEARCH, maybe results vary widely from person to person and it's just not that simple. In any case, the drug industry has a vested interest in discrediting the vitamin industry, and the very fact that both of them and the medical industry are "industries" is part of the problem with modern health care.
When a musical artist wants to perform a cover of a copyrighted song (which means pretty much *any* song), there is a fixed, comparatively small charge paid to a clearing house. Why is the licensing for a patent like MagSafe so variable and expensive by negotiation with each licensee? We pay the USB and SD and Microsoft and all kinds of other consortia taxes for their standards, whether buried in the connector cost or explicitly in other ways, and in exchange we get the benefits of interoperability. Plus if this is a safety standard on all portable equipment (presumably to be expanded for power+comm at some point), pennies per connector would still make lots of money for Apple without burdening anyone else.
Privacy and encryption *are* a form of digital rights management - you want to manage your digital data so that only you have rights to it.
The problem is not DRM. The problem is the abrupt change from "you bought something so it's yours" to "you think you bought something, but you really only licensed it until we or our industry say otherwise".
In 2012 in New York City there was an incident near the Empire State Building. One person killed another, premeditated, a dismissed employee taking revenge on the person he thought responsible. A crime, but comprehensible. Two police officers confronted the shooter, he pulled his gun, and they fired numerous times - hitting NINE bystanders in addition to the shooter. And these were supposedly trained, practiced officers. What would one expect from the average (or, 50% of the time, below-average) armed bystander?
Your point is valid; rendering the lawful weaponless does make them easier prey for the weapon-carrying. However, this is not directly opposed (logically) to the premise that limiting access to longer-ranged and more-deadly weapons would make for less damage. A knife fight may end with a death, but is unlikely to accidentally kill bystanders, or - as has happened more than once - people inside a building, who would have been thought completely disconnected from the scene. And a knife-wielder can be subdued by unarmed bystander(s) with reasonable expectations of survival, which leads them to try it; while a shooter can probably kill multiple people before anyone even gets to him, so no one is even willing to essay the challenge.
Your second point is equally valid: Don't blame the tool, blame the user. BUT if the user is carrying lockpicks, and is not a licensed locksmith, it is reasonable to question what locks he is planning on opening; and if the user is carrying deadly weapons when it is no longer the Wild West, it is reasonable to ask why he needs to be ready to kill someone.
In Switzerland, every one of those people with a military reserve weapon has had proper firearms training, and is expected to have their weapon properly stored and secured. Switzerland also has one important advantage over the US: a much more homogeneous population and mindset. It is unfortunate that the US collective mindset towards weapons comes from the more recent era of the "Wild West" rather than the Revolutionary era militias.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like "realistic expectations" to me. Another comment from a similar colleague: Arranged marriages (at the level his family expected) were more like business partnerships put together by VCs. The families and/or their agents/matchmakers were looking for good combinations who would not have met by chance - even if they went to the same school or trade show (if only because genders are carefully polite in their culture).
TV shows are not made to entertain people. They are made to gather people in front of a particular station, at a particular time, so that they become an "audience" (perhaps with a particular "demographic"), during which time the station SELLS YOUR EYEBALLS to advertisers. The "scarcity" model is not artificial; it is a crucial component of maintaining the novelty of the show so that it can be used as bait again to gather more eyeballs for more advertisements.
Once something is available on DVD (or, now, for streaming), it is automatically less valuable for re-runs, because everyone who wants to see it has already had the ability to see it whenever they want, instead of the once-a-year that "seasonal favorites" were released when I was a kid (and you HAD to be in front of the TV when it was on, because there was no home VCR to time-shift it). (Disney manages to suppress their content for years between releases, making scarcity itself a product.) Plus the producers cannot sell new advertisements; they had to make one-time deals even for "coming attractions" on the disk (out-of-date within a year, and therefore often of value only to the same producer), and certainly had to make a one-time deal for the cost of selling the material in physical form. No wonder they prefer the pay-per-view jukebox model.
Remember: In the video industry, if you can't see the product they are selling, it's YOU.
Ummm . . . this is true. I was thinking of the degree of reaction once the fabrications were discovered, as contrasted with the total lack of retraction or correction for total nonsense that happens today. Your point that he *did* get away with it for a long time sort of casts a pall on that.
Jacob and his sons identified themselves to Pharaoh as shepherds, and earlier Jacob bred goats specifically for the coloration that was part of his deal with Laban. Our biblical forefathers understood about "selection" and "breeding for traits". The idea that natural circumstances are as much a "selection" as human choice is not much of a stretch.
Phenomenology suggests that the entire universe is merely a figment of my imagination, conjured up from the tiny amount of input I appear to have from "eyes" and "ears". Besides, why would I want to believe in, much less worship, a deity who treats his creations with all of the kindness and care of a temper-tantruming-two-year-old?
"Yellow journalism" was about politically and socially slanted news with a deliberate intent. OP is talking about people just plain getting things wrong and nobody caring.
The Wall Street Journal is pro-business. Well, yeah, it's *named* for the center of financial business, so it's *honestly* presenting a particular editorial viewpoint. One can accept and work with that. The problem is taking every rumor and first report and rebroadcasting them as "fact". History - like, a few hours later - may well explain why people got things wrong at first impression, and nobody can blame first reporters for having a narrow local perspective on whatever they can see from where they happen to be standing, and those first reports may well be crucial in rousing an alarm; but wrong is wrong, and "alarm reports" are not what news organizations used to mean by "reports from the scene" or "facts on the ground".
This is not at all suggesting we should ignore crowdsourced information. Without dashcams and other random sources, we would have missed video of asteroids and air crashes and all sorts of news. But openness to accepting information from more sources needs *more* editing and selectivity, not less, because of the lowered average quality and reliability.
Not fair. You asked for proof that things used to be better, that people used to care more about accuracy, and you were answered. It is *sad* that the examples are from a decade or more ago.
OTOH Physical attack just takes a few hotheads with more machismo than brains. Biological or chemical attack in a crowded mall or transportation hub would be fairly simple. "Just blowing something up" and "limited damage" could still pull down the power grid.
Perhaps the important point is that it doesn't take much "real" effort to damage infrastructure and cause trouble, or even death and destruction. And it doesn't even take guns; derailing a train should only take a bunch of bricks and the quick-drying cement you patch steps with, if you know the line isn't busy for a few hours.
In the simplest example, one would think that power stations would have communications online constantly and someone would notice when they were cut (though emptying a few magazines into high voltage equipment probably takes less time than the police do).
How about Settlers of Catan, Dominion, Blokus, Set, Cartagena, Carcassonne, . . . .
People argue about pennies spent on school lunches, but can't be bothered to track millions spent on surveillance? Numerous cities, especially New York, have demonstrated that contemporaneous analysis of data, and general analysis of trends and patterns, can make a big difference in incidents. (We all think tech is cool in a Tom Clancy novel, or a military operation; why not for police?)
I know that an internal combustion engine works by exploding gas in the cylinders and pistoning the camshaft yadda yadda. This does not help at all, and is in fact a useless distraction, during the normal task of driving back and forth to work. It also does not help with the normal maintenance of checking the oil and topping off the windshield washer fluid. 90% of what 90% of programmers do similarly doesn't need the under-the-hood stuff. BTW I do embedded systems programming, where EVERYTHING matters . . . except that I'd rather use an RTOS than hand-code every single thing every single f'ing time, and concentrate my efforts on the new hardware and special control rather than the same old menu crap I've done dozens of times before.
I think it's more of the "Big Lie" technique as defined by Goebbels. Keep asserting something long enough, however outlandish, and eventually people will be telling each other, "Oh, I know it's true, I heard it on the news or something".
Absolutely. What other response would one expect from a "former acting director of the CIA"? He is promulgating the security establishment's position.
Did RSA take $10 million from the NSA and if so for what service?
Sounds like the leadin to an old joke . . .
She: What kind of woman do you think I am?
He: We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price.
They should have said: "Hey, it's $10 million bucks, what would you have done?"
I'll go further on that: "It's $10 million bucks from our own government's black program who could put us out of business or have us convicted of something." This might have been an offer they couldn't safely refuse - and it's *supposedly* from the *good* guys.
Consider how often, in book and film and TV, our heroes just "suit up and go for a walk". No big deal, just get dressed. From Robert Heinlein's scenes of combat suited soldiers preparing for a drop in "Starship Troopers", more like cleaning their wiper blades than tuning up their car; Space Hulk terminator armor through lots of movies since, suits aren't much more inconvenient, and mecha - hah! just hop in the chair, click on the four-points, and drive away.
Yet in real life we have seen that even enclosed pilot flight gear needs more complexity, and the balloon jump within the atmosphere wasn't exactly simple. The comfort we normal passengers experience on an airplane, with shirtsleeve environment and acceptable noise level, shows just how much detail has been considered by others - and the fact that we ride in calm equanimity shows how little we consider those 1 in a million events like a rock being in the way.
Isn't Newton-Raphson an "approximation"?
Vitamins were being pushed strongly when I was a kid. Since they typically were extracts and concentrates of food products, they are regulated by the FOOD regulators rather than the DRUG regulators. As the pendulum swung to finding "natural" cures for everything - a modern herbalism - the drug companies kept trying to control the business by arguing first that vitamins are useless (and only "drugs" are useful), then that vitamins should be regulated as drugs (which of course they are the most experienced at controlling), then that they are of inconsistent quality (unfortunately true, but better quality control is a good concept for drugs *or* food), and now again that they are useless.
Maybe average-quality inconsistent multivitamins really are not as useful as hoped. Maybe all of the research pro-vitamin was wrong. Or, more likely, JUST LIKE DRUG RESEARCH, maybe results vary widely from person to person and it's just not that simple. In any case, the drug industry has a vested interest in discrediting the vitamin industry, and the very fact that both of them and the medical industry are "industries" is part of the problem with modern health care.
When a musical artist wants to perform a cover of a copyrighted song (which means pretty much *any* song), there is a fixed, comparatively small charge paid to a clearing house. Why is the licensing for a patent like MagSafe so variable and expensive by negotiation with each licensee? We pay the USB and SD and Microsoft and all kinds of other consortia taxes for their standards, whether buried in the connector cost or explicitly in other ways, and in exchange we get the benefits of interoperability. Plus if this is a safety standard on all portable equipment (presumably to be expanded for power+comm at some point), pennies per connector would still make lots of money for Apple without burdening anyone else.
Privacy and encryption *are* a form of digital rights management - you want to manage your digital data so that only you have rights to it.
The problem is not DRM. The problem is the abrupt change from "you bought something so it's yours" to "you think you bought something, but you really only licensed it until we or our industry say otherwise".
... along the lines of Reversii/Othello
In 2012 in New York City there was an incident near the Empire State Building. One person killed another, premeditated, a dismissed employee taking revenge on the person he thought responsible. A crime, but comprehensible. Two police officers confronted the shooter, he pulled his gun, and they fired numerous times - hitting NINE bystanders in addition to the shooter. And these were supposedly trained, practiced officers. What would one expect from the average (or, 50% of the time, below-average) armed bystander?
Your point is valid; rendering the lawful weaponless does make them easier prey for the weapon-carrying. However, this is not directly opposed (logically) to the premise that limiting access to longer-ranged and more-deadly weapons would make for less damage. A knife fight may end with a death, but is unlikely to accidentally kill bystanders, or - as has happened more than once - people inside a building, who would have been thought completely disconnected from the scene. And a knife-wielder can be subdued by unarmed bystander(s) with reasonable expectations of survival, which leads them to try it; while a shooter can probably kill multiple people before anyone even gets to him, so no one is even willing to essay the challenge.
Your second point is equally valid: Don't blame the tool, blame the user. BUT if the user is carrying lockpicks, and is not a licensed locksmith, it is reasonable to question what locks he is planning on opening; and if the user is carrying deadly weapons when it is no longer the Wild West, it is reasonable to ask why he needs to be ready to kill someone.
In Switzerland, every one of those people with a military reserve weapon has had proper firearms training, and is expected to have their weapon properly stored and secured. Switzerland also has one important advantage over the US: a much more homogeneous population and mindset. It is unfortunate that the US collective mindset towards weapons comes from the more recent era of the "Wild West" rather than the Revolutionary era militias.