Are you suggesting that pain relief after popping a pill is the same as drooling after hearing a bell?
In the sense that they both may be conditioned responses that do not depend upon conscious knowledge, yes. Indeed, that is one of the current hypotheses regarding the biological mechanism that is responsible for the placebo effect.
Operant conditioning operates below the level of conscious awareness. People, even intelligent people, can be conditioned to do things without being aware that they are being conditioned. Indeed, if challenged as to why they are behaving in a certain way, they will confabulate a rationalization. A classic practical joke on the part of students in science classes is to condition the professor. It is very simply done. All that is necessary is to for all of the students to conspire to reinforce the behavior by giving the appearance of being more interested when the professor does a certain thing, and less interested when he does not. I knew one case in which the professor was conditioned to deliver his lectures from outside the door of his classroom. In another instance, the professor was reinforced when he used a certain word. The class tracked his usage of that word, and after it increased to a high level, they then extinguished the behavior by wittholding reinforcement. At the end of the term, they presented the data as a class project. The professor was not amused...
Anyone can be 'tricked' into reacting a certain way. But smart people are 1) aware that it may be a trick and 2) can do research to see if it is a trick, and 3) have an open mind to experimental results. This means fewer smart people are tricked than dumb people.
Intelligent people, such a doctors, are often the prey of con artists. One reason why they are particularly vulnerable is that they often have an exaggerated idea of how well their intelligence will allow them to see through scams. Notice how many otherwise intelligent people invested in Madoff's scheme.
Here's an simple example: If you give a stupid person a placebo, they 'think' it works, so it works. Give a placebo to a smart person, and they (because they are smart and want to expend their knowledge) look up the active ingredient, see that it's worthless, and aren't fooled.
Here, you make two unfounded assumptions. First, you assume that you can look up all ingredients and determine for certain whether they work. In real life, however, very few substances have been adequately tested for clinical efficacy. Even for those that have been tested, the literature is often somewhat ambiguous (has it been tested for people just like you, with your specific medical condition?) In the studies described in the Wired article, the compounds being tested are new drugs that might or might not work. Moreover, your assumption that a smart person would look up the ingredient seems questionable. Assuming that you yourself are a smart person, it follows that you would have looked up the ingredients of all of the medications you are taking. Yet you seem surprisingly unaware of the limitations of the medical literature when it comes to obtaining a definitive answer to this kind of question.
You are also assuming that the placebo effect works at the level of conscious knowledge. But not all physiological reactions depend upon conscious knowledge. For example, if you are used to hearing a dinner bell just before the meal is served, you will salivate when you hear the bell--even if you happen to know for a fact that dinner is not being served tonight.
In fact, there is no evidence that the placebo response has any relationship to intelligence, or that stupid people are any more suggestible than smart people.
You can't set a broken leg with a placebo, but you might be able to make it hurt a little less. Remember "kiss it and make it better?" Or the miraculous analgesic effect of a Band-Aid (especially one with pictures of cartoon characters)?
Some evidence suggests that part of the placebo response to pain is related to release of opiate like substances in the brain.
Rather than scaling back, it may simply be the recognition that HD has become so ubiquitous that HDMI is no longer an exotic connector that a consumer won't be able to find if it is not included.
Many first person games compensate for this by providing a wider field of view than you would see if your monitor were actually a window into the action. While this may enhance game play for some types of games, it has the net effect of "miniaturizing" the scene, possibly undermining the immersiveness of the game. Bioshock on the XBox 360 took the "window" approach, with a more realistic point of view. It was widely acclaimed as one of the most immersive first-person games to date, but it also came in for criticism for fans of traditional FPS games, some of whom were very upset not to enjoy the exaggerated field of view of many first-person shooters.
My XBox 360 has actually been more reliable than my PS3, which has died twice (one a failed HD that I replaced myself, once YLOD that required a $150 replacement from Sony). Of course, that may in part be because the 360 is so noisy that I never forget to turn it off when I"m done using it, while I leave the PS3 running continuously and donate time to the Folding@home project
I'm impressed with the PS3's media capabilities. I really like the PS3's pseudo-3D menu system. Understated, very easy to navigate, and you always know where you are in a menu hierarchy. The Microsoft interface is typically Microsoft--lots of flashy graphics, but hard to find your way around, and stuffed with advertising. The PS3's prowess as an upscaling DVD player is impressive, comparable to expensive standalone players, and of course it does bluray too. The XBox 360 DVD player, on the other hand, is about the equivalent of one of those $30 players that Best Buy stacks up near the door. The PS3 plays a lot of media formats, although I have seen it fail on some oddball.wmv files that the XBox 360 can manage. I'm not sure why, but I've had more difficulty streaming files from PC to the XBox 360 with UPnP than I have with the PS3.
The only real strength of the XBox 360 as a media center is Netflix, but that's a big advantage if you don't have the same capability somewhere else.
You can't patent an idea, only an invention or a process. If Mr. Coffee has patents on their coffee maker, it doesn't mean that nobody else can make coffee makers, it means nobody can use their way of making a coffee makers.
Unless, of course, your way of making coffee makers is so superior that nobody wants to make them any other way.
Yet Dish, with its huge profits and its ability to hire the best legal teams in the country, has in multiple proceedings been unable to convince a court that TiVo's patents are covered by prior art. Hmmm...I wonder if the courts, which actually inspected the details of the patents and listened to the arguments of both sets of lawyers, might...just possibly...know something that you don't?
Yes, applying the word "troll" is inappropriate, because TiVo is actively selling DVRs using its proprietary technology--stand-alone units, Comcast TiVos, and a new DirecTV model next year. What we have is huge companies appropriating ideas and technology developed by a small company, and hoping that they can get away with it long enough for the small company to fail.
Frankly, from what I've seen of imitation TiVo's. The companies that have tried to clone TiVo have done a pretty lousy job of it, and we'd be better off if they just licensed it from TiVo.
I think Apple's thinking is a bit wrong-headed, but I believe that I understand the reasoning. I'd guess that it goes something like this. "The appeal of the iPhone rests upon the ease of use and integration of features like Visual Voice Mail, the Address Book, Mail, and the Phone application. Right now this is entirely under our control. What happens if everybody starts using Google's apps and bypassing ours? How will we add new features to enhance the Mail and Voice features of the iPhone? What if we add new features and they don't work with Google Voice? If Google Voice becomes very popular, and we add a new feature that doesn't work right with Google voice, people will complain about us, not Google. It is far better not to have a feature at all than to have one that doesn't work right? Are we going to end up having to go hat in hand to Google, who is competing with us in the cell phone arena, to make sure that whatever we do to enhance the iPhone user experience works with Google Voice?"
I've got a number of systems running OS X 10.3. It still works fine, at a total upgrade cost that is less than Windows XP. But the added features of successive Mac upgrades have generally been sufficiently appealing to be worth the upgrade cost to most users.
Apple charges me around $100 each year to upgrade my G4 Mac from 10.3 to 10.4 to 10.5, whereas Microsoft charged me *nothing* to upgrade from XP to XP-SP1 to SP2 to SP3. Over the last seven years using Wintel OS has been free, where using Apple's OS has been costly.
Apple does release periodic "under the hood" upgrades analogous to Microsoft's Service Packs. They are free. Apple occasionally releases major upgrades that include new software that adds major features or applications (e.g. Dashboard, Time Machine). These are typically priced at $129.
The next major release is somewhat unusual, as it includes major "under-the-hood" enhancements and some new features (full 64 bit OS, support for Microsoft Exchange) but (at least based on announcements) no major new programs. The announced price is $29.
Paid upgrades (list prices) Mac 2001 Mac OS X 10.1 $129 2002 Mac OS X 10.2 $129 (Address Book, iChat) 2003 Mac OS X 10.3 $129 (Expose, Filevault) 2004 Mac OS X 10.4 $129 (Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator) 2007 Mac OS X 10.5 $129 (Time Machine, Spaces, Boot Camp) 2009 Mac OS X 10.6 $29
Total: $674
----- Windows 2001 Windows XP Pro $299.99 2007 Windows Vista Business $299.99 2009 Windows 7 Pro $199.99
Total $699.97
Of course, one can shave costs off of either by skipping some upgrades. So I suppose that one could say that Microsoft saved users money by not making Vista so appealing that most customers saw a reason to upgrade.
Yes. Google maps won't give you voice directions so you don't have to constantly look away from the road while driving. And it won't automatically work out a new route if you make a mistake.
The use of bacteria to break down cellulose is itself an ugly evolutionary kluge. It would be much simpler if mammals made cellulase. But the bacteria were already there, and natural selection frequently chooses the most direct solution rather than the ideal one.
The theory of natural selection entails a mechanism for generation of new diversity. Darwin postulated this, because the theory of natural selection required it to function. Darwin's prediction was confirmed with the discovery of mutation.
Actually, this is a rather well written article, with several points you chose to ignore (including the Google Voice fiasco, treatment of App Store developers
I ignored these because they seemed to have nothing at all do with the author's thesis regarding secrecy--it seemed that the author was so anxious to criticize Apple that he just threw in everything he could think of, whether or not it was relevant or made any sense. What does Google Voice have to do with secrecy? It is clearly an application that impinges on the core business of Apple and Apple's partner AT&T. One can reasonably question whether such restrictions actually benefit Apple and AT&T, or whether it would be a good business move for Apple to invest more of its resources in hiring people to work with developers of rejected applications and help them create approvable applications (and perhaps make up the cost by taking a bigger cut from developers' profits), but it has nothing to do with secrecy.
I know this is slashdot, and who am I to tell you to RTFA (I don't usually read them myself, I'm more interested in the comments)
I would not consider commenting on such a thread without reading TFA--my criticisms are of TFA.
The article seems kind of stupid. For example, he dismisses the motive of withholding information from competitors who might want to create rush knock-offs on the grounds that "no amount of secrecy will stop it." This is a like arguing that nobody should lock their doors, because houses get burgled anyway, and no amount of locks will stop it. He argues that copying is "a normal part of the business cycle," begging the question of whether it is beneficial to the company that is copied--and ignores the fact that trade secrets are also a normal part of business. He implies that Apple might somehow be culpable in the suicide of an employee, even though there is no evidence whatsoever that Apple drove him to suicide, and the apparent motive (to the extent that anything is known)--failing in one's responsibility--can be and has been a motive for suicide in many contexts that do not necessarily involve secrecy.
Even if there are some valid grounds for criticizing Apple's policies (and it is hard to defend some of their litigious actions), the obvious bias behind such obviously fallacious arguments undermines the case
The symptoms this man describes sound similar to anxiety disorder with agoraphobia. It's not uncommon, and is very treatable with cognitive behavioral therapy and an anti-anxiety medication such as an SSRI. Sufferers of this have physiological symptoms which are subjectively-- and sometimes objectively-- indistinguishable from anything from allergies to more serious medical conditions. The body creates a feedback loop in the endocrine system and the mind assigns causative correlations with anything that was happening at the time. It can result in anything from hot flashes to stuffy noses to a full-on asthma attack.
The same is true for people who claim "multiple chemical sensitivity" to tiny levels of all sorts of environmental chemicals. It seems to be most successfully treated as a type of anxiety or obsessive/compulsive disorder.
I strongly agree. Any child with even a hint of taste instinctively rebells at being forced to write the atrociously ugly Palmer script, which took centuries of beautiful handwriting and stomped it into the dust. Most of the people I know with decent handwriting abandoned Palmer and went back to printing. After a few years they evolved their own, individual script that was faster, more legible, and more attractive than Palmer cursive.
No child should ever be taught cursive. It is a waste of precious school time, and needlessly tortures children who are still developing their hand coordination. With keyboards ubiquitous, hardly anybody needs to hand write fast anymore, and if you need to write really fast, you need shorthand, not cursive. If you want to write attractively, you are better off learning a classical script style like Chancery cursive.
The Palmer style of cursive handwriting was a destructive educational fad. Teaching it should be regarded as a form of child abuse. The Palmer method was a contrived educational monstrosity that discarded the beauty of Spencerian flexible-pen script and lovely broad-nib hands such as Arrighi's Chancery style in favor of a horrendously ugly travesty that was both more difficult to write and more difficult to read.
In fact, there is no reason whatsoever to teach cursive. Since hardly anybody writes anything lengthy by hand, the advantage of teaching an efficient script is minimal. Printing is adequate for most purposes, and the time previously devoted to cursive is much better spent learning to use a keyboard. Anybody who learns printing and does much hand writing will naturally evolve an efficient personal cursive, and one that will almost certainly be more attractive and legible than Palmer (it would be hard to come up with anything worse). For those who would like to improve the attractiveness of their handwriting, electives could be provided in classical handwriting forms such as Spencerian and Chancery cursive.
I think violence has gone down only because these masses of violent gamers are too busy trying to finish today's 800(sic) hour long video games.
While I recognize that you are being facetious, there could be something in what you say. I'm hesitant to infer causality from correlation--as I said, the fall in violent crime may reflect social and economic factors that have nothing to do with games. On the other hand, there may be something in the "idle hands" notion. This is, after all, the reasoning behind the establishment of youth centers and neighborhood sports leagues. The time that people spend playing video games is time that is not being spent getting into trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
You can:
http://www.ehow.com/how_2160460_custom-iphone-ringtones-free.html
This is just for people willing to pay a nominal fee for the convenience of simply ordering a ringtone
Indeed. One of the things "street smarts" teaches you is, in the words of Richard Feynman,
In the sense that they both may be conditioned responses that do not depend upon conscious knowledge, yes. Indeed, that is one of the current hypotheses regarding the biological mechanism that is responsible for the placebo effect.
Operant conditioning operates below the level of conscious awareness. People, even intelligent people, can be conditioned to do things without being aware that they are being conditioned. Indeed, if challenged as to why they are behaving in a certain way, they will confabulate a rationalization. A classic practical joke on the part of students in science classes is to condition the professor. It is very simply done. All that is necessary is to for all of the students to conspire to reinforce the behavior by giving the appearance of being more interested when the professor does a certain thing, and less interested when he does not. I knew one case in which the professor was conditioned to deliver his lectures from outside the door of his classroom. In another instance, the professor was reinforced when he used a certain word. The class tracked his usage of that word, and after it increased to a high level, they then extinguished the behavior by wittholding reinforcement. At the end of the term, they presented the data as a class project. The professor was not amused...
Intelligent people, such a doctors, are often the prey of con artists. One reason why they are particularly vulnerable is that they often have an exaggerated idea of how well their intelligence will allow them to see through scams. Notice how many otherwise intelligent people invested in Madoff's scheme.
Here, you make two unfounded assumptions. First, you assume that you can look up all ingredients and determine for certain whether they work. In real life, however, very few substances have been adequately tested for clinical efficacy. Even for those that have been tested, the literature is often somewhat ambiguous (has it been tested for people just like you, with your specific medical condition?) In the studies described in the Wired article, the compounds being tested are new drugs that might or might not work. Moreover, your assumption that a smart person would look up the ingredient seems questionable. Assuming that you yourself are a smart person, it follows that you would have looked up the ingredients of all of the medications you are taking. Yet you seem surprisingly unaware of the limitations of the medical literature when it comes to obtaining a definitive answer to this kind of question.
You are also assuming that the placebo effect works at the level of conscious knowledge. But not all physiological reactions depend upon conscious knowledge. For example, if you are used to hearing a dinner bell just before the meal is served, you will salivate when you hear the bell--even if you happen to know for a fact that dinner is not being served tonight.
In fact, there is no evidence that the placebo response has any relationship to intelligence, or that stupid people are any more suggestible than smart people.
You can't set a broken leg with a placebo, but you might be able to make it hurt a little less.
Remember "kiss it and make it better?" Or the miraculous analgesic effect of a Band-Aid (especially one with pictures of cartoon characters)?
Some evidence suggests that part of the placebo response to pain is related to release of opiate like substances in the brain.
Rather than scaling back, it may simply be the recognition that HD has become so ubiquitous that HDMI is no longer an exotic connector that a consumer won't be able to find if it is not included.
Many first person games compensate for this by providing a wider field of view than you would see if your monitor were actually a window into the action. While this may enhance game play for some types of games, it has the net effect of "miniaturizing" the scene, possibly undermining the immersiveness of the game. Bioshock on the XBox 360 took the "window" approach, with a more realistic point of view. It was widely acclaimed as one of the most immersive first-person games to date, but it also came in for criticism for fans of traditional FPS games, some of whom were very upset not to enjoy the exaggerated field of view of many first-person shooters.
My XBox 360 has actually been more reliable than my PS3, which has died twice (one a failed HD that I replaced myself, once YLOD that required a $150 replacement from Sony). Of course, that may in part be because the 360 is so noisy that I never forget to turn it off when I"m done using it, while I leave the PS3 running continuously and donate time to the Folding@home project
I'm impressed with the PS3's media capabilities. I really like the PS3's pseudo-3D menu system. Understated, very easy to navigate, and you always know where you are in a menu hierarchy. The Microsoft interface is typically Microsoft--lots of flashy graphics, but hard to find your way around, and stuffed with advertising. The PS3's prowess as an upscaling DVD player is impressive, comparable to expensive standalone players, and of course it does bluray too. The XBox 360 DVD player, on the other hand, is about the equivalent of one of those $30 players that Best Buy stacks up near the door. The PS3 plays a lot of media formats, although I have seen it fail on some oddball .wmv files that the XBox 360 can manage. I'm not sure why, but I've had more difficulty streaming files from PC to the XBox 360 with UPnP than I have with the PS3.
The only real strength of the XBox 360 as a media center is Netflix, but that's a big advantage if you don't have the same capability somewhere else.
Unless, of course, your way of making coffee makers is so superior that nobody wants to make them any other way.
Yet Dish, with its huge profits and its ability to hire the best legal teams in the country, has in multiple proceedings been unable to convince a court that TiVo's patents are covered by prior art. Hmmm...I wonder if the courts, which actually inspected the details of the patents and listened to the arguments of both sets of lawyers, might...just possibly...know something that you don't?
Yes, applying the word "troll" is inappropriate, because TiVo is actively selling DVRs using its proprietary technology--stand-alone units, Comcast TiVos, and a new DirecTV model next year. What we have is huge companies appropriating ideas and technology developed by a small company, and hoping that they can get away with it long enough for the small company to fail.
Frankly, from what I've seen of imitation TiVo's. The companies that have tried to clone TiVo have done a pretty lousy job of it, and we'd be better off if they just licensed it from TiVo.
I think Apple's thinking is a bit wrong-headed, but I believe that I understand the reasoning. I'd guess that it goes something like this. "The appeal of the iPhone rests upon the ease of use and integration of features like Visual Voice Mail, the Address Book, Mail, and the Phone application. Right now this is entirely under our control. What happens if everybody starts using Google's apps and bypassing ours? How will we add new features to enhance the Mail and Voice features of the iPhone? What if we add new features and they don't work with Google Voice? If Google Voice becomes very popular, and we add a new feature that doesn't work right with Google voice, people will complain about us, not Google. It is far better not to have a feature at all than to have one that doesn't work right? Are we going to end up having to go hat in hand to Google, who is competing with us in the cell phone arena, to make sure that whatever we do to enhance the iPhone user experience works with Google Voice?"
I've got a number of systems running OS X 10.3. It still works fine, at a total upgrade cost that is less than Windows XP. But the added features of successive Mac upgrades have generally been sufficiently appealing to be worth the upgrade cost to most users.
Apple does release periodic "under the hood" upgrades analogous to Microsoft's Service Packs. They are free.
Apple occasionally releases major upgrades that include new software that adds major features or applications (e.g. Dashboard, Time Machine). These are typically priced at $129.
The next major release is somewhat unusual, as it includes major "under-the-hood" enhancements and some new features (full 64 bit OS, support for Microsoft Exchange) but (at least based on announcements) no major new programs. The announced price is $29.
Paid upgrades (list prices)
Mac
2001 Mac OS X 10.1 $129
2002 Mac OS X 10.2 $129 (Address Book, iChat)
2003 Mac OS X 10.3 $129 (Expose, Filevault)
2004 Mac OS X 10.4 $129 (Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator)
2007 Mac OS X 10.5 $129 (Time Machine, Spaces, Boot Camp)
2009 Mac OS X 10.6 $29
Total: $674
-----
Windows
2001 Windows XP Pro $299.99
2007 Windows Vista Business $299.99
2009 Windows 7 Pro $199.99
Total $699.97
Of course, one can shave costs off of either by skipping some upgrades. So I suppose that one could say that Microsoft saved users money by not making Vista so appealing that most customers saw a reason to upgrade.
Yes. Google maps won't give you voice directions so you don't have to constantly look away from the road while driving. And it won't automatically work out a new route if you make a mistake.
Yet cattle and rabbits excrete just fine despite digesting cellulose. For that matter, a lot of the bulk is bacteria.
The use of bacteria to break down cellulose is itself an ugly evolutionary kluge. It would be much simpler if mammals made cellulase. But the bacteria were already there, and natural selection frequently chooses the most direct solution rather than the ideal one.
The theory of natural selection entails a mechanism for generation of new diversity. Darwin postulated this, because the theory of natural selection required it to function. Darwin's prediction was confirmed with the discovery of mutation.
I ignored these because they seemed to have nothing at all do with the author's thesis regarding secrecy--it seemed that the author was so anxious to criticize Apple that he just threw in everything he could think of, whether or not it was relevant or made any sense. What does Google Voice have to do with secrecy? It is clearly an application that impinges on the core business of Apple and Apple's partner AT&T. One can reasonably question whether such restrictions actually benefit Apple and AT&T, or whether it would be a good business move for Apple to invest more of its resources in hiring people to work with developers of rejected applications and help them create approvable applications (and perhaps make up the cost by taking a bigger cut from developers' profits), but it has nothing to do with secrecy.
I would not consider commenting on such a thread without reading TFA--my criticisms are of TFA.
The article seems kind of stupid. For example, he dismisses the motive of withholding information from competitors who might want to create rush knock-offs on the grounds that "no amount of secrecy will stop it." This is a like arguing that nobody should lock their doors, because houses get burgled anyway, and no amount of locks will stop it. He argues that copying is "a normal part of the business cycle," begging the question of whether it is beneficial to the company that is copied--and ignores the fact that trade secrets are also a normal part of business. He implies that Apple might somehow be culpable in the suicide of an employee, even though there is no evidence whatsoever that Apple drove him to suicide, and the apparent motive (to the extent that anything is known)--failing in one's responsibility--can be and has been a motive for suicide in many contexts that do not necessarily involve secrecy.
Even if there are some valid grounds for criticizing Apple's policies (and it is hard to defend some of their litigious actions), the obvious bias behind such obviously fallacious arguments undermines the case
The same is true for people who claim "multiple chemical sensitivity" to tiny levels of all sorts of environmental chemicals. It seems to be most successfully treated as a type of anxiety or obsessive/compulsive disorder.
I strongly agree. Any child with even a hint of taste instinctively rebells at being forced to write the atrociously ugly Palmer script, which took centuries of beautiful handwriting and stomped it into the dust. Most of the people I know with decent handwriting abandoned Palmer and went back to printing. After a few years they evolved their own, individual script that was faster, more legible, and more attractive than Palmer cursive.
No child should ever be taught cursive. It is a waste of precious school time, and needlessly tortures children who are still developing their hand coordination. With keyboards ubiquitous, hardly anybody needs to hand write fast anymore, and if you need to write really fast, you need shorthand, not cursive. If you want to write attractively, you are better off learning a classical script style like Chancery cursive.
The Palmer style of cursive handwriting was a destructive educational fad. Teaching it should be regarded as a form of child abuse. The Palmer method was a contrived educational monstrosity that discarded the beauty of Spencerian flexible-pen script and lovely broad-nib hands such as Arrighi's Chancery style in favor of a horrendously ugly travesty that was both more difficult to write and more difficult to read.
In fact, there is no reason whatsoever to teach cursive. Since hardly anybody writes anything lengthy by hand, the advantage of teaching an efficient script is minimal. Printing is adequate for most purposes, and the time previously devoted to cursive is much better spent learning to use a keyboard. Anybody who learns printing and does much hand writing will naturally evolve an efficient personal cursive, and one that will almost certainly be more attractive and legible than Palmer (it would be hard to come up with anything worse). For those who would like to improve the attractiveness of their handwriting, electives could be provided in classical handwriting forms such as Spencerian and Chancery cursive.
While I recognize that you are being facetious, there could be something in what you say. I'm hesitant to infer causality from correlation--as I said, the fall in violent crime may reflect social and economic factors that have nothing to do with games. On the other hand, there may be something in the "idle hands" notion. This is, after all, the reasoning behind the establishment of youth centers and neighborhood sports leagues. The time that people spend playing video games is time that is not being spent getting into trouble.