So I should have allowed the bad ad and hope I don't click it accidentally?
All I'm saying is that if I don't admit the fake mailman in the first place, I don't have to worry about whether or not he's going to rob me. Not sure what's so hard to understand about that.
It's as if you're smug about blocking ads, and I honestly don't know why you would be smug about that.
Personally, the only time I'm ever smug about blocking ads is when I read about ads being used to deliver malware. It's not the same as ads on TVs, more like ads delivered in person to your living room by random people who might rob or vandalize you. I understand that blocking ads breaks web sites revenue models...but as long as ads remain an unnecessary malware vector, I will not feel one bit of remorse for blocking them.
I was heavily considering writing a book on Erlang.
It's a good thing I didn't. God only knows what the market for Erlang publications would be like if there were THREE books to choose from!
Frankrike = France, Estland = Estonia, Litauen = Lithuania, Lettland = Latvia, Grekland = Greece, Sverige = Sweden, Österrike = Austria, Tyskland = Germany, Ungern = Hungary, Tjeckien = Czech Rep. The rest should be self evident. BTW, I don't speak Swedish whatsoever.
It has gotten to the point where wealthy bad citizens (especially corporate "citizens") have a massive advantage in changing the laws to their benefit, just as massive an advantage in getting favorable representation in court, and are far more likely to be able to take advantage of political corruption; i.e., they can break the laws with near impunity.
I am not trying to rationalize law-breaking by any means, however many people I talk to these days share the sinking feeling that being the "good citizen" means being the "last sucker", and that is how the rule of law is eroded. How are those ( in the words of Leona Helmsley) "little people" to fight this when the playing field is tilted so heavily against them?
Fair enough, but I didn't say that scientists shouldn't have heroes or "be cool", nor did I say a parent should necessarily discourage that.
My point was that the very nature of science doesn't make it prone to producing "heroes", because unlike sports, music and entertainment, it is not about the individual's achievement but the achievement itself. Most of modern science great achievements are never tied to anyone's name, but you never hear "modern football has finally achieved the 300 yard rushing game" without someone being lionized for it.
Better yet, if you think your kid has a love for science, tell him that both "coolness" and "hero worship" are antithetical to real science. Science is not a popularity contest, nor is science made great because it is done by a great scientist. Good science stands because it withstands further scientific challenge, and the personal characteristics of the scientist do not matter one bit.
Then past that, remember that no matter how things may appear, as a parent *you* are always going to be your child's most significant role model and whatever sports stars/rock stars/entertainers "heroes" your kid cycles through growing up will be largely irrelevant to how s/he fares in life.
...they just need to be right 51% of the time to stay in business.
I agree with your general point, however since this is a thread about correlation/causation, I'm going to point out that this statement is not really accurate. The profit of a company's good business decisions must exceed the losses from their bad decisions...how often those decisions must be correct depends on the nature of business. Consider an investor as a simple illustration: if one invests equally in 10 blue chip stocks that on average yield 10%, one bad decision (say one stock was WaMu, considered safe until it went belly up) can wipe out all of the profit from the other 9; on the other hand, one could invest equally in 100 different options or futures, and have 99 lose their entire value, but have the remaining one return so wildly that it makes up for all of the other losses. In other words, depending on the risk/reward balance of the business decisions in question, you can be wrong far less than half the time and fail, or you can be right only occasionally and still profit.
If you prefer, think of Microsoft...only a handful of their products/ventures make up the vast bulk of their profits, the majority only break even or fail miserably.
Please tell me, what perfectly innocuous things might your friends take pictures of that would ruin your job/life/whatever.
How about a picture of you at a cancer patient support group, which is then discovered by a prospective employer that is concerned about keeping the cost of employee health benefits down? Even if such discrimination is technically illegal, do think such knowledge couldn't affect your ability to get a job?
Bravo! As a committed Facebook avoider, my problem is not nearly so much with Facebook as the increasing number of people who think they can't communicate with me because I haven't been assimilated into the Zuckerborg. Sorry, that's what you get if you choose a walled garden as your primary communications medium, especially one that's entire purpose is to gather information about you.
And being that you can't even seem to make a consistent argument, it makes no never mind to me what you wrongly think is a "strawman". My point is made.
Eh despite another poster trying to paint them as robots, they are in fact human beings and will react differently until certain situations start occurring or they realise that others think they are occurring.
I can accept that they are human beings that will react differently. It was your assertion that his reaction was based on his training that made me wonder why the female officer did not react in an even remotely similar fashion. Strangely, first you implied she did (her "training kicked in"), but now you seem to admit that she didn't.
If it was so distasteful to her why didn't she stop it from happening or interfere in some way? Solidarity?
I didn't say she found it "so distasteful" as to consider intervening, just embarrassing. However, in my experience, cops often do refrain from intervening against overreacting colleagues precisely because of "thin blue line" solidarity.
Why do you think police officers in every developed country act the same way in crowd control situations? And they do.
Wait, didn't you just get done evading the point about the different response by saying they are human beings who will react differently? You can't have it both ways.
And I will also note as a US native now living in Canada, I don't think what you say is true. In my experience, the behavio(u)r of OB is more of an exception to cops in Canada, but is closer to the rule for US cops.
Unless you're saying that most police officers are congenitally vicious thugs.
No just that, being human beings as you note, *some* are, and I think that the difference between OB reaction and the female officer demonstrates that.
She only looked embarrassed for a moment, then you will observe the training kicked in.
Not sure what you mean by "training kicked in", so I watched it again. At first, the female officer is smiling. Then OB threatens the girl with arrest if a bubble hits him. Then it cuts back to the female officer looking embarrassed. Then we cut back to the girl and OB. Then it cuts back to the female officer, and she's smirking. That's the last we see of her in this video, and even if my reading of her facial expression is subjective, the fact that shows no other physical or verbal reaction is not.
She obviously does not react in the same way that OB does, and I'm puzzled as to what you think shows that her "training kicked in" (meaning that she would react in a similar way to OB since they would have similar training).
Yup, I'm not saying he was justified, but in all likelihood he was just doing exactly as his training dictated.
If so, why didn't the female officer next to him *not* react in the same way, instead silently bearing a look of embarrassment for her colleague's overreaction? Would she not have received the same training?
Umm . . . just a century or two ago, cholera was common, as was drinking beer in place of water since it had been boiled and made sterile.
OK, this may be a pedantic nit, but the boiling and sterility of beer wort is fairly irrelevant on that score, since beer wort is boiled *before* being fermented, which is pretty much the exact opposite of sterilization. Before Pasteur, they didn't even know that microorganisms were what caused fermentation. Also, wine was also safer to drink than water, and wine is *not* boiled prior to fermentation.
It is alcohol content and acidity that made fermented beverages safer than water to drink in the days prior to sanitation.
Funny, you dredge up stuff from the 70-80 years ago, plus a 7-year-old minor fraud perpetrated on the paper by an employee (and that the paper itself detected and blew the whistle on), but omit the most serious failure in reporting by the Times in the last half-century: Judith Miller's trumpeting of the cooked and clearly defective intelligence claims of the Bush Administration about Iraq's supposed WMDs.
Just as bad, IMHO, was the decision to delay for a year their reporting on Bush's eavesdropping program that was submitted prior to the 2004 election.
I think there is evidence that it has learned its lesson and will not be lap dog for right-wing craziness in the future. So maybe you should give the NYT a second chance.
Enough people will pay, especially for the New York Times.
I wouldn't be so sure. They already tried to implement a limited pay wall called "Time Select" in 2005 and was discontinued after two years. The most prominent thing that was charged for was their Op-Ed columnists (Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, et al.), and guess what, they all complained bitterly about it because it greatly decreased their readership and influence. In Friedman's words, "I hate it. It pains me enormously because it’s cut me off from a lot, a lot of people, especially because I have a lot of people reading me overseas, like in India... I feel totally cut off from my audience." However, the main reason for its failure seemed to be a recognition that subscription fees did not make up for the loss of ad revenue from decreased traffic.
Why they think a pay wall will work any better now is beyond me. My best guess is that they figure with more people using mobile devices and e-readers that more people will be willing to pay, but from what they are describing, I'd think they'd get an even bigger drop off in traffic from the new pay wall. Time(s) will tell.
Slashdot Mirror
So I should have allowed the bad ad and hope I don't click it accidentally?
All I'm saying is that if I don't admit the fake mailman in the first place, I don't have to worry about whether or not he's going to rob me. Not sure what's so hard to understand about that.
Say what you will...but when the New York Times got hit with malicious ads last year, as a regular NYT user of the site I was unaffected because of AdBlock. You should have heard the howls of those who didn't.
It's as if you're smug about blocking ads, and I honestly don't know why you would be smug about that.
Personally, the only time I'm ever smug about blocking ads is when I read about ads being used to deliver malware. It's not the same as ads on TVs, more like ads delivered in person to your living room by random people who might rob or vandalize you. I understand that blocking ads breaks web sites revenue models...but as long as ads remain an unnecessary malware vector, I will not feel one bit of remorse for blocking them.
I was heavily considering writing a book on Erlang. It's a good thing I didn't. God only knows what the market for Erlang publications would be like if there were THREE books to choose from!
Don't forget Erlang: The Movie!!
Frankrike = France, Estland = Estonia, Litauen = Lithuania, Lettland = Latvia, Grekland = Greece, Sverige = Sweden, Österrike = Austria, Tyskland = Germany, Ungern = Hungary, Tjeckien = Czech Rep. The rest should be self evident. BTW, I don't speak Swedish whatsoever.
This does not include days like Halloween and Christmas etc.
Who the hell gets Halloween as a paid holiday?
Good citizens follow the laws. Bad citizens break them.
Unless there is a grave moral principle involved, WORK lawfully to change the law.
Is the rule of law a grave moral principle?
It has gotten to the point where wealthy bad citizens (especially corporate "citizens") have a massive advantage in changing the laws to their benefit, just as massive an advantage in getting favorable representation in court, and are far more likely to be able to take advantage of political corruption; i.e., they can break the laws with near impunity.
I am not trying to rationalize law-breaking by any means, however many people I talk to these days share the sinking feeling that being the "good citizen" means being the "last sucker", and that is how the rule of law is eroded. How are those ( in the words of Leona Helmsley) "little people" to fight this when the playing field is tilted so heavily against them?
Fair enough, but I didn't say that scientists shouldn't have heroes or "be cool", nor did I say a parent should necessarily discourage that.
My point was that the very nature of science doesn't make it prone to producing "heroes", because unlike sports, music and entertainment, it is not about the individual's achievement but the achievement itself. Most of modern science great achievements are never tied to anyone's name, but you never hear "modern football has finally achieved the 300 yard rushing game" without someone being lionized for it.
Find your own hero, kid.
Better yet, if you think your kid has a love for science, tell him that both "coolness" and "hero worship" are antithetical to real science. Science is not a popularity contest, nor is science made great because it is done by a great scientist. Good science stands because it withstands further scientific challenge, and the personal characteristics of the scientist do not matter one bit.
Then past that, remember that no matter how things may appear, as a parent *you* are always going to be your child's most significant role model and whatever sports stars/rock stars/entertainers "heroes" your kid cycles through growing up will be largely irrelevant to how s/he fares in life.
...they just need to be right 51% of the time to stay in business.
I agree with your general point, however since this is a thread about correlation/causation, I'm going to point out that this statement is not really accurate. The profit of a company's good business decisions must exceed the losses from their bad decisions...how often those decisions must be correct depends on the nature of business. Consider an investor as a simple illustration: if one invests equally in 10 blue chip stocks that on average yield 10%, one bad decision (say one stock was WaMu, considered safe until it went belly up) can wipe out all of the profit from the other 9; on the other hand, one could invest equally in 100 different options or futures, and have 99 lose their entire value, but have the remaining one return so wildly that it makes up for all of the other losses. In other words, depending on the risk/reward balance of the business decisions in question, you can be wrong far less than half the time and fail, or you can be right only occasionally and still profit.
If you prefer, think of Microsoft...only a handful of their products/ventures make up the vast bulk of their profits, the majority only break even or fail miserably.
Please tell me, what perfectly innocuous things might your friends take pictures of that would ruin your job/life/whatever.
How about a picture of you at a cancer patient support group, which is then discovered by a prospective employer that is concerned about keeping the cost of employee health benefits down? Even if such discrimination is technically illegal, do think such knowledge couldn't affect your ability to get a job?
Bravo! As a committed Facebook avoider, my problem is not nearly so much with Facebook as the increasing number of people who think they can't communicate with me because I haven't been assimilated into the Zuckerborg. Sorry, that's what you get if you choose a walled garden as your primary communications medium, especially one that's entire purpose is to gather information about you.
Sky Saxon
Grant you, not his real name, but still.
That's right, folks...don't click that "F"!!
Considering your penchant for the non sequitur, I'm sure you did.
And *I* used a strawman? LOL
And being that you can't even seem to make a consistent argument, it makes no never mind to me what you wrongly think is a "strawman". My point is made.
Eh despite another poster trying to paint them as robots, they are in fact human beings and will react differently until certain situations start occurring or they realise that others think they are occurring.
I can accept that they are human beings that will react differently. It was your assertion that his reaction was based on his training that made me wonder why the female officer did not react in an even remotely similar fashion. Strangely, first you implied she did (her "training kicked in"), but now you seem to admit that she didn't.
If it was so distasteful to her why didn't she stop it from happening or interfere in some way? Solidarity?
I didn't say she found it "so distasteful" as to consider intervening, just embarrassing. However, in my experience, cops often do refrain from intervening against overreacting colleagues precisely because of "thin blue line" solidarity.
Why do you think police officers in every developed country act the same way in crowd control situations? And they do.
Wait, didn't you just get done evading the point about the different response by saying they are human beings who will react differently? You can't have it both ways.
And I will also note as a US native now living in Canada, I don't think what you say is true. In my experience, the behavio(u)r of OB is more of an exception to cops in Canada, but is closer to the rule for US cops.
Unless you're saying that most police officers are congenitally vicious thugs.
No just that, being human beings as you note, *some* are, and I think that the difference between OB reaction and the female officer demonstrates that.
She only looked embarrassed for a moment, then you will observe the training kicked in.
Not sure what you mean by "training kicked in", so I watched it again. At first, the female officer is smiling. Then OB threatens the girl with arrest if a bubble hits him. Then it cuts back to the female officer looking embarrassed. Then we cut back to the girl and OB. Then it cuts back to the female officer, and she's smirking. That's the last we see of her in this video, and even if my reading of her facial expression is subjective, the fact that shows no other physical or verbal reaction is not.
She obviously does not react in the same way that OB does, and I'm puzzled as to what you think shows that her "training kicked in" (meaning that she would react in a similar way to OB since they would have similar training).
Sorry, "why *did* the female officer *not* react...."?
Yup, I'm not saying he was justified, but in all likelihood he was just doing exactly as his training dictated.
If so, why didn't the female officer next to him *not* react in the same way, instead silently bearing a look of embarrassment for her colleague's overreaction? Would she not have received the same training?
Umm . . . just a century or two ago, cholera was common, as was drinking beer in place of water since it had been boiled and made sterile.
OK, this may be a pedantic nit, but the boiling and sterility of beer wort is fairly irrelevant on that score, since beer wort is boiled *before* being fermented, which is pretty much the exact opposite of sterilization. Before Pasteur, they didn't even know that microorganisms were what caused fermentation. Also, wine was also safer to drink than water, and wine is *not* boiled prior to fermentation.
It is alcohol content and acidity that made fermented beverages safer than water to drink in the days prior to sanitation.
Funny, you dredge up stuff from the 70-80 years ago, plus a 7-year-old minor fraud perpetrated on the paper by an employee (and that the paper itself detected and blew the whistle on), but omit the most serious failure in reporting by the Times in the last half-century: Judith Miller's trumpeting of the cooked and clearly defective intelligence claims of the Bush Administration about Iraq's supposed WMDs.
Just as bad, IMHO, was the decision to delay for a year their reporting on Bush's eavesdropping program that was submitted prior to the 2004 election.
I think there is evidence that it has learned its lesson and will not be lap dog for right-wing craziness in the future. So maybe you should give the NYT a second chance.
Just curious, what evidence would that be?
Enough people will pay, especially for the New York Times.
I wouldn't be so sure. They already tried to implement a limited pay wall called "Time Select" in 2005 and was discontinued after two years. The most prominent thing that was charged for was their Op-Ed columnists (Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, et al.), and guess what, they all complained bitterly about it because it greatly decreased their readership and influence. In Friedman's words, "I hate it. It pains me enormously because it’s cut me off from a lot, a lot of people, especially because I have a lot of people reading me overseas, like in India ... I feel totally cut off from my audience." However, the main reason for its failure seemed to be a recognition that subscription fees did not make up for the loss of ad revenue from decreased traffic.
Why they think a pay wall will work any better now is beyond me. My best guess is that they figure with more people using mobile devices and e-readers that more people will be willing to pay, but from what they are describing, I'd think they'd get an even bigger drop off in traffic from the new pay wall. Time(s) will tell.
Spammers are getting more shy? That's a relief!
Careful what you wish for...instead of getting rickrolled you might end up being Kajagoogled.