I travel all over Europe and Asian as part of job and for personal reasons and I have learned one thing..NEVER take unofficial taxis. EVER.
Which is why I don't get the concern about Uber etc. I travel abroad plenty and finding out what official taxis are, how to make sure it is an official taxi, how to check they are doing what an official taxi should etc is a lot of work and still has risks. With a system like Ubers I know that the car I'm calling is part of their network, would be kicked off rapidly if they don't follow Uber's rules etc. I've only used Uber a couple of times and in places where I know the official taxis are legit, but I'd probably feel safer taking an Uber ride in Thailand than finding an official taxi.
All fair points, although I think you are taking my use of the word 'mundane' to mean poor, when I merely mean unremarkable. The vast majority of people live unremarkable lives by definition. There isn't a right answer to the question of what to live your life for. I don't see "live to be happy" as a better mantra than "live to help others" for example, it's an extremely personal issue. In general I think people focus to much on acquiring things, including wealth, but I'm hesistant to go further than that.
There's a pretty strong body of evidence that says irrationality can help with happiness, and that actively avoiding news/politics can make people happier. Personally I'd rather be a little bit less happy, but be informed and try and make decisions to help others.
Life is not about the money, it's about the legacy you are leaving behind.
Ultimately it is up to each of us to decide what we think is is about; although I personally feel similarly to you. My point was more to highlight the absurdity about IQ being treated as a something to be proud of. People lie about IQ just like they lie about height and penis length; yet they have no control over their things. I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of if you have a crazy high IQ and don't become a nobel prize winner; however talking about having a high IQ as though it looks good when you haven't achieved anything with it seems to be a strange social compulsion.
The Constitution has nothing on the right to travel and, if you ask a government official, you'll quickly realize, they consider traveling to be a privilege instead.
I appreciate that you aren't taking this position, just highlighting that it exists; however I think it is worth emphasising that the constitition does cover this.
9th Amendment "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
10th Amentment "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Now we both know that isn't how the government chooses to 'interpret' the constitution, however the issue there is their ability to willfully misinterpret not the lack of clarity. You simply cannot make the constitution complete enough and clear enough that your freedoms are protected. Have an amendment saying they can't stop you travelling and they'll just interpret that as being limited to walking;)
What I find particularily amusing about people claiming falsely inflated IQ's is that it shouldn't rationally be anything in itself to brag about. Due to behavioural issues when I was in primary school my IQ was tested, I can't remember the score but it was decent and I was fortunate enough to get accepted into a school for children with behavioural issues which selected for potential. That meant I got a reasonable education, when most kids who had behaved like me would be lucky if the schools they got sent to didn't lead to crime and drugs. Mathematics was always my strongest area. I completed my GCSE 4 years early and did a couple of advanced courses. I remember the odd conversation with staff about how I could go on to study maths at Oxbridge and go into mathematics research etc.
Sounds like a bragging story right? Well it isn't. What I've told you is that I had a comparative advantage as a child, no different to being given say a million pounds at birth. It tells you that it should have been easier for me to succeed than for others. However, I'm not a world renowned mathematician or running my own company. So far in my life my achievements are pretty mundane, even though I was handed a headstart. Claiming to have a high IQ and not having achieved more than average is saying you had a headstart on everyone else and you wasted it.
Intelligent people realize they are immature, and strive to gain more experience and insight before they act.
That isn't the definition of intelligence that other people use, nor is it what dictionaries would call it. Intelligence is generally accepted to be the ability to take in information and to apply that information; it is not the amount of knowledge you have already acquired or even inherently the rationality with which you choose to apply it or not.
I was probably about as intelligent when I was 16 as I am now, perhaps more so, but I don't I was as wise or knowledgeable back then. Sometimes the best way to learn is to try and fail, rather than delay indefinitely as you over-theorise and either never act or act too late.
A less accurate weapon is obviously going to have an influence on bullets fired; however, the majority of the difference will be because the vast majority of bullets fired in standard infantry combat will be suppressing or speculative shots. Taking 3 shots to hit someone you're targetting instead of 2 doesn't waste a whole lot of bullets. Firing a couple of clips near them to keep the suppressed will. One assumes to get a figure like 250k bullets a kill they are also including things like weapons fired at field ranges etc.
It's a bit like saying who cares if 0.2% of the worlds land area was heavily irradiated when you don't know whether that 0.2% is in a desert where only a couple of camels would notice, or the locations of the 25 largest cities in the world leading to hundreds of millions dead and displaced.
Meat would be significantly more expensive, when you blur the lines on something that definitive by saying it "maybe" it diminishes the rest of your point. That's not to say meat shouldn't be considerably more expensive.
I think we can all agree that reducing gentle knocks hugely while bring in a few more multi-fatality crashes isn't progress, so can we assume that other people have the intelligence to also be making the same assumption that crashes need to be of roughly equal magnitude to make a straight trade off?
You'd probably think I was being pedantic if I said your point depended on what was 'serious' and what was 'minor' after all.
I spend ~£300 a year on insurance, and would happily pay that and another £500 a year not to have to drive my car. Over 10 years that's an £8k premium. If the car is safer than the average driver then there should be a considerable financial incentive to solve the liability issue.
Not so much missing, as not relevant to the point he was making. The fact you missed his point: I don't think "because drivers keep hitting them" ever came up as a reason. and also missed it when he said: By and large, while it's never going to be economical or appropriate everywhere, you don't want trees close to major roads. and decided to make up a disagreement doesn't reflect well on your understanding of the conversation.
Since we're in bad analogies, how about buying a bus pass and then having to wait for the next bus because the first one is full.
I know you said bad analogies, but there's bad and false. In this case the bus isn't 'full' they're stopping you getting on the bus, which has spaces, so that they can ensure there is space for other bus pass holders that have used their pass less in the last few days.
A little pointless pedantry don't you think? If a bus company sold unlimited passes and did what you described they'd still be facing a class action lawsuit in short order.
anyways, the problem with penalizing the top 10% is that next month top 10% will have smaller use and the next month 10% is smaller and the next 10% is smaller... ending up with 100mbytes getting you into the top 10% users before long. what kind of "unlimited" is that?
I agree. Better to have the cut off as a certain multiple (say 10x) average use. That way the limit would increase naturally with average use, and only those way out of line with the average would be capped.
It seems to me that Verison's problem is on the marketing side. Their technical implementation is correct.
Pretty much, although it is a little more than 'marketting' when a company sells you 'unlimited internet' but doesn't provide that. The issue pretty much boils down to the fact that for 99%+ of users 100GB a month would be plenty, but those users want the security of knowing that their policy is 'unlimited' so they won't a surprise charge if they use more than normal. 'Unllimited' is the wrong word to use for a clearly limited service even if for most users it's the same as unlimited, but the problem is that there's no clearly understood term for 'effectively unlimited for the vast majority of customers'.
Personally, I think the best option would be to accept that the word unlimited is misused, and create a level of service that is required to be allowed to call it 'unlimited'. That limit could be, for example, 10x the average usage calculated each year based on the previous year, with the consequence for breaching the limit being restricted to removing service to people who repeatedly exceed it. That way when the vast majority of users buy an 'unlimited' package they are getting what they want and expect (all they need with no risk of fines) and the very small group of high bandwidth users can pay for a premium package.
How is this any different from you going to the police right now and saying you watched your neighbour murder someone?
It depends, did I set up hundreds of cameras that are triggered by suspicious behaviour to alert me of the murder and if so is that appropriate? How is your example different from schools indoctrinating children to expose their parents for un-patriotic actions? Generally, the answer would be by degrees rather then inherently unrelated.
The argument of "if you don't like it, then encrypt it" is pretty naive. How is it better that we establish a norm of companies searching your communications for evidence of government mandated crimes when the measure is so easy for remotely competent child abusers to avoid? Personally, I see 'civilised society' meaning that if we did business and you passed me a pile of documents and asked me to give it to someone I was meeting later that day I wouldn't go searching through them to see if they contained evidence of a crime.
That assumes you start from the premise that it is wrong for the law to ever compel something be removed from the internet. There are many who think that it should be possible to force certain things off the internet. If that is your position then relying on asking a foriegn body nicely to stop isn't going to seem like a viable solution. Ultimately I don't think the internet should magically change how things are treated. If I could require a UK based site to remove/amend content via the courts, then I should be able to ask foriegn sites to do the same and if they refuse then the UK court should be able to block it. However that is a process clearly based on a court of law, not a company deciding what should/shouldn't be seen, and is restricted to things that would be covered by UK law already not a pretty vague notion of being out of date.
Except, in this case, the call was not anonymous. Furthermore, the police used the email as evidence to get a warrant to search his devices, and found other images. So, he is not being charged based on just one email.
One of the issues with many in the anti-'think of the children' camp is that sometime what is going on seems reasonable in those circumstances. They should be willing to say "Yes I can see why people would be glad that this happened but..." and then point out that having private companies searching through your mail and reporting anything they like to law enforcement isn't a good precedent. Do they really want Google telling the government who owns guns, who visits anti-government websites, what they say on their hangouts about campaigning against the president etc? Sometimes the price we need to pay for keeping a healthy distance from totalitarianism is to not do certain things that might let us catch a few more bad people in the short term.
This is a stupid regulation. If someone doesn't want to have their story "out there" , they should just approach the publisher directly.
It is stupid regulation, but your alternative solution is also pretty stupid. Firstly, it makes no sense for publishers to put any effort into deciding if they need to remove content or not without a potential legal consequence, and secondly the majority of web content is outside UK jurisdiction. They are going after search engines because trying to get a website hosted in Buenos Aires to take down a misleading and outdated article related to the Falklands war isn't viable for example.
Now the reason the law is stupid, isn't because it targets search engines but because it expects private corporations to make judgements on what should or shouldn't be forgotten.
If that was true, then ad blocking tools would not be very popular. They are, so this isn't true.
That's a pretty big logical fail. Firstly he said 'almost everyone' is happy and installation figures for adblock software back that up. Secondly, he is making the point that most people prefer free sites with ads over pay sites, which again is pretty obvious given the lack of pay sites for most content. The fact that a small subset of people are willing to ignore the wishes of the people producing the content they consume by blocking their revenue mechanic just shows that self-entitlement is alive and well.
The fact it's a rental service and they make that clear isn't an issue. Clearly some people don't want that, which is fine. Personally I like the subscription model. Both Spotify and Netflix work for me, and at $5 a month I'd consider a games rental subscription. I would however be interested to see how they handle DLC etc and just how much of their newer library they put online.
Sure I wouldn't 'own' anything but then all the music I bought on tape isn't exactly useful, nor are VHS videos etc. I don't care if I still 'own' BF4 in 10 years time when I likely wouldn't have a console to play it on and the servers it needs were turned off.
It's certainly possible that companies are misunderstanding the market, however if that's the case then there's a considerable opportunity for disruption that you would expect one or more challenger manufacturers to try and exploit. There are certainly companies out there making phones that vary considerably from the iPhone after all.
Apple, Samsung, HTC, and probably all other major manufacturers have pretty much settled on a single generic form factor. You could argue that this is due to them blindly assuming that this is what customers want; however, many manufacturers offered a range of alternative designs until well after the iPhone was a huge hit (while obviously releasing their me too products as well). If there was a big market out there for phones that didn't fit this cookie cutter then I find it unlikely that they would have stopped producing models which were selling well, when they could keep selling those alongside new models.
It's about cost really. It's cheaper to manufacture phones without a physical keyboard.
A bit over-simplistic, especially as the article itself goes on about the only physical keyboards left being on cheap phones.
Ultimately it's pretty simple. Potentially the majority of people may prefer a physical keyboard to a virtual one, but they also prefer a smaller phone to a bigger one etc. Without two full products to compare it's pretty nonsensical to ask people for preference on one feature that vastly alters the rest of the product. Many people prefer an electric car to a petrol one so why aren't all the cars being sold electric? Perhaps it's because they also don't want to pay more and want to be able to quickly refuel to travel longer distances...
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why I don't get the concern about Uber etc. I travel abroad plenty and finding out what official taxis are, how to make sure it is an official taxi, how to check they are doing what an official taxi should etc is a lot of work and still has risks. With a system like Ubers I know that the car I'm calling is part of their network, would be kicked off rapidly if they don't follow Uber's rules etc. I've only used Uber a couple of times and in places where I know the official taxis are legit, but I'd probably feel safer taking an Uber ride in Thailand than finding an official taxi.
All fair points, although I think you are taking my use of the word 'mundane' to mean poor, when I merely mean unremarkable. The vast majority of people live unremarkable lives by definition. There isn't a right answer to the question of what to live your life for. I don't see "live to be happy" as a better mantra than "live to help others" for example, it's an extremely personal issue. In general I think people focus to much on acquiring things, including wealth, but I'm hesistant to go further than that.
There's a pretty strong body of evidence that says irrationality can help with happiness, and that actively avoiding news/politics can make people happier. Personally I'd rather be a little bit less happy, but be informed and try and make decisions to help others.
Ultimately it is up to each of us to decide what we think is is about; although I personally feel similarly to you. My point was more to highlight the absurdity about IQ being treated as a something to be proud of. People lie about IQ just like they lie about height and penis length; yet they have no control over their things. I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of if you have a crazy high IQ and don't become a nobel prize winner; however talking about having a high IQ as though it looks good when you haven't achieved anything with it seems to be a strange social compulsion.
I appreciate that you aren't taking this position, just highlighting that it exists; however I think it is worth emphasising that the constitition does cover this.
;)
9th Amendment "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
10th Amentment "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Now we both know that isn't how the government chooses to 'interpret' the constitution, however the issue there is their ability to willfully misinterpret not the lack of clarity. You simply cannot make the constitution complete enough and clear enough that your freedoms are protected. Have an amendment saying they can't stop you travelling and they'll just interpret that as being limited to walking
What I find particularily amusing about people claiming falsely inflated IQ's is that it shouldn't rationally be anything in itself to brag about. Due to behavioural issues when I was in primary school my IQ was tested, I can't remember the score but it was decent and I was fortunate enough to get accepted into a school for children with behavioural issues which selected for potential. That meant I got a reasonable education, when most kids who had behaved like me would be lucky if the schools they got sent to didn't lead to crime and drugs. Mathematics was always my strongest area. I completed my GCSE 4 years early and did a couple of advanced courses. I remember the odd conversation with staff about how I could go on to study maths at Oxbridge and go into mathematics research etc.
Sounds like a bragging story right? Well it isn't. What I've told you is that I had a comparative advantage as a child, no different to being given say a million pounds at birth. It tells you that it should have been easier for me to succeed than for others. However, I'm not a world renowned mathematician or running my own company. So far in my life my achievements are pretty mundane, even though I was handed a headstart. Claiming to have a high IQ and not having achieved more than average is saying you had a headstart on everyone else and you wasted it.
That isn't the definition of intelligence that other people use, nor is it what dictionaries would call it. Intelligence is generally accepted to be the ability to take in information and to apply that information; it is not the amount of knowledge you have already acquired or even inherently the rationality with which you choose to apply it or not.
I was probably about as intelligent when I was 16 as I am now, perhaps more so, but I don't I was as wise or knowledgeable back then. Sometimes the best way to learn is to try and fail, rather than delay indefinitely as you over-theorise and either never act or act too late.
A less accurate weapon is obviously going to have an influence on bullets fired; however, the majority of the difference will be because the vast majority of bullets fired in standard infantry combat will be suppressing or speculative shots. Taking 3 shots to hit someone you're targetting instead of 2 doesn't waste a whole lot of bullets. Firing a couple of clips near them to keep the suppressed will. One assumes to get a figure like 250k bullets a kill they are also including things like weapons fired at field ranges etc.
It's a bit like saying who cares if 0.2% of the worlds land area was heavily irradiated when you don't know whether that 0.2% is in a desert where only a couple of camels would notice, or the locations of the 25 largest cities in the world leading to hundreds of millions dead and displaced.
Meat would be significantly more expensive, when you blur the lines on something that definitive by saying it "maybe" it diminishes the rest of your point. That's not to say meat shouldn't be considerably more expensive.
I think we can all agree that reducing gentle knocks hugely while bring in a few more multi-fatality crashes isn't progress, so can we assume that other people have the intelligence to also be making the same assumption that crashes need to be of roughly equal magnitude to make a straight trade off?
You'd probably think I was being pedantic if I said your point depended on what was 'serious' and what was 'minor' after all.
I spend ~£300 a year on insurance, and would happily pay that and another £500 a year not to have to drive my car. Over 10 years that's an £8k premium. If the car is safer than the average driver then there should be a considerable financial incentive to solve the liability issue.
Not so much missing, as not relevant to the point he was making. The fact you missed his point: I don't think "because drivers keep hitting them" ever came up as a reason. and also missed it when he said: By and large, while it's never going to be economical or appropriate everywhere, you don't want trees close to major roads. and decided to make up a disagreement doesn't reflect well on your understanding of the conversation.
I know you said bad analogies, but there's bad and false. In this case the bus isn't 'full' they're stopping you getting on the bus, which has spaces, so that they can ensure there is space for other bus pass holders that have used their pass less in the last few days.
A little pointless pedantry don't you think? If a bus company sold unlimited passes and did what you described they'd still be facing a class action lawsuit in short order.
I agree. Better to have the cut off as a certain multiple (say 10x) average use. That way the limit would increase naturally with average use, and only those way out of line with the average would be capped.
Pretty much, although it is a little more than 'marketting' when a company sells you 'unlimited internet' but doesn't provide that. The issue pretty much boils down to the fact that for 99%+ of users 100GB a month would be plenty, but those users want the security of knowing that their policy is 'unlimited' so they won't a surprise charge if they use more than normal. 'Unllimited' is the wrong word to use for a clearly limited service even if for most users it's the same as unlimited, but the problem is that there's no clearly understood term for 'effectively unlimited for the vast majority of customers'.
Personally, I think the best option would be to accept that the word unlimited is misused, and create a level of service that is required to be allowed to call it 'unlimited'. That limit could be, for example, 10x the average usage calculated each year based on the previous year, with the consequence for breaching the limit being restricted to removing service to people who repeatedly exceed it. That way when the vast majority of users buy an 'unlimited' package they are getting what they want and expect (all they need with no risk of fines) and the very small group of high bandwidth users can pay for a premium package.
It depends, did I set up hundreds of cameras that are triggered by suspicious behaviour to alert me of the murder and if so is that appropriate? How is your example different from schools indoctrinating children to expose their parents for un-patriotic actions? Generally, the answer would be by degrees rather then inherently unrelated.
The argument of "if you don't like it, then encrypt it" is pretty naive. How is it better that we establish a norm of companies searching your communications for evidence of government mandated crimes when the measure is so easy for remotely competent child abusers to avoid? Personally, I see 'civilised society' meaning that if we did business and you passed me a pile of documents and asked me to give it to someone I was meeting later that day I wouldn't go searching through them to see if they contained evidence of a crime.
That assumes you start from the premise that it is wrong for the law to ever compel something be removed from the internet. There are many who think that it should be possible to force certain things off the internet. If that is your position then relying on asking a foriegn body nicely to stop isn't going to seem like a viable solution. Ultimately I don't think the internet should magically change how things are treated. If I could require a UK based site to remove/amend content via the courts, then I should be able to ask foriegn sites to do the same and if they refuse then the UK court should be able to block it. However that is a process clearly based on a court of law, not a company deciding what should/shouldn't be seen, and is restricted to things that would be covered by UK law already not a pretty vague notion of being out of date.
One of the issues with many in the anti-'think of the children' camp is that sometime what is going on seems reasonable in those circumstances. They should be willing to say "Yes I can see why people would be glad that this happened but..." and then point out that having private companies searching through your mail and reporting anything they like to law enforcement isn't a good precedent. Do they really want Google telling the government who owns guns, who visits anti-government websites, what they say on their hangouts about campaigning against the president etc? Sometimes the price we need to pay for keeping a healthy distance from totalitarianism is to not do certain things that might let us catch a few more bad people in the short term.
It is stupid regulation, but your alternative solution is also pretty stupid. Firstly, it makes no sense for publishers to put any effort into deciding if they need to remove content or not without a potential legal consequence, and secondly the majority of web content is outside UK jurisdiction. They are going after search engines because trying to get a website hosted in Buenos Aires to take down a misleading and outdated article related to the Falklands war isn't viable for example.
Now the reason the law is stupid, isn't because it targets search engines but because it expects private corporations to make judgements on what should or shouldn't be forgotten.
That's a pretty big logical fail. Firstly he said 'almost everyone' is happy and installation figures for adblock software back that up. Secondly, he is making the point that most people prefer free sites with ads over pay sites, which again is pretty obvious given the lack of pay sites for most content. The fact that a small subset of people are willing to ignore the wishes of the people producing the content they consume by blocking their revenue mechanic just shows that self-entitlement is alive and well.
The fact it's a rental service and they make that clear isn't an issue. Clearly some people don't want that, which is fine. Personally I like the subscription model. Both Spotify and Netflix work for me, and at $5 a month I'd consider a games rental subscription. I would however be interested to see how they handle DLC etc and just how much of their newer library they put online.
Sure I wouldn't 'own' anything but then all the music I bought on tape isn't exactly useful, nor are VHS videos etc. I don't care if I still 'own' BF4 in 10 years time when I likely wouldn't have a console to play it on and the servers it needs were turned off.
First Madden was released in 1988 so either you've got a time machine or whatever you were actually doing in the 70s has fucked your memory ;)
It's certainly possible that companies are misunderstanding the market, however if that's the case then there's a considerable opportunity for disruption that you would expect one or more challenger manufacturers to try and exploit. There are certainly companies out there making phones that vary considerably from the iPhone after all.
Apple, Samsung, HTC, and probably all other major manufacturers have pretty much settled on a single generic form factor. You could argue that this is due to them blindly assuming that this is what customers want; however, many manufacturers offered a range of alternative designs until well after the iPhone was a huge hit (while obviously releasing their me too products as well). If there was a big market out there for phones that didn't fit this cookie cutter then I find it unlikely that they would have stopped producing models which were selling well, when they could keep selling those alongside new models.
A bit over-simplistic, especially as the article itself goes on about the only physical keyboards left being on cheap phones.
Ultimately it's pretty simple. Potentially the majority of people may prefer a physical keyboard to a virtual one, but they also prefer a smaller phone to a bigger one etc. Without two full products to compare it's pretty nonsensical to ask people for preference on one feature that vastly alters the rest of the product. Many people prefer an electric car to a petrol one so why aren't all the cars being sold electric? Perhaps it's because they also don't want to pay more and want to be able to quickly refuel to travel longer distances...