I'd really like to see the study on this one. Not that I'm skeptical at all, I just think it's really interesting. Do you have a link? Author? Publication?
A thought, however, is this. Were the "fights" 1:1? How often do cops really get into fights with people 1:1? Just a thought.
You always hope against experience that the slashdot mods aren't going to mod based on their politics, but it always happens. What's with the "overrated" mods anyway? I don't think I've ever given out a negative mod myself. The point is to find good points to mod up, not to piss on people's arguments if you feel offended. What good can come of downmodding?
Anyway, in the spirit of hunting for "overrated" mods, I found out that I had left out some additional interesting info I'm sure some doe-eyed liberal can take horrible offense at. It's a better response to the Kellermen quote I listed above than the one I included in my own post.
Emory University medical professor Arthur Kellermann is a one-man factory of this type of misleading data. One of his most famous studies purported to show that owning a gun is associated with a 2.7 times greater risk of being murdered. Kellermann compared murder victims in several cities with sociologically similar people a few blocks away in those cities, who had not been murdered. The 2.7 factoid was trumpeted all over the country; but the study is patently illogical. First of all, Kellermann's own data show that owning a security system, or renting a home rather than owning it, are also associated with equally large increased risks of death. Yet newspapers did not start running dire stories warning people to rip out their burglar alarms or to start lobbying their condo association to dissolve. The 2.7 factoid also overlooks the obvious fact that one reason people choose to own guns, or to install burglar alarms, is that they are already at higher risk of being victimized by crime. As Yale law professor John Lott points out, Kellermann's methodology is like comparing 100 people who went to a hospital in a given year with 100 similar people who did not, finding that more of the hospital patients died, and then announcing that hospitals increase the risk of death. Kellermann's method would also prove that possession of insulin increases the risk of diabetes.
From wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_ United_States#Self-defense_and_gun_violence)
I guess the lesson should be to beware of statistics. Take the car insurance stat you hear all the time. "Our users saved an average of x when they switched to us!" What does that really mean? It took an average savings of x to induce someone to switch. If you said "our users saved an average of 10,000 by switching!" what would that mean? Well first of all, it may be that only.01% of people who got quotes saved any money at all. And secondly, it could easily mean that their service is so awful people have to save $10,000 a year before they consider it worthwhile to switch. So the stat means either nothing, or means that the company has bad service. And yet it's quoted all the time.
But in the gun-rights debate, it seems that the "save the children" crowd are the ones most prone to either make up random statistics or misuse actual ones.
I'm really not buying this. If the cop lets go of the gun, the guy is likely to shoot instantly. You're not going to go for a gun unless you're trying to shoot it (in general).
Even if the cop starts to get some distance, how exact is the radius of the RFID going to be? Depending on whether it's a ring or a watch or a bracelett, what clothes they're wearing, etc. there's no way to know how close you have to be in practice for the gun to be armed.
Besides, it's not like the cop can outrun the bullet or something.
Let's make handguns look dangerous first. Then we can say:
A gun kept in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a homicide, suicide or unintentional shooting than to be used in self-defense.
- Kellerman AL, Lee RK, Mercy JA, et al. "The Epidemiological Basis for the Prevention of Firearm Injuries." Annu. Rev. Public Health. 1991; 12:17-40
Of course, there's no way to determine how many lives were actually saved by the presence of guns in the homes. Either a potential robber is an acquaintance of the home and doesn't want to rob where there are guns, or there's a posted "I have a gun" sign so a stranger is deterred, or there's just the general fact that criminals know that home invasion in the U.S. is like Russian roulette. Sooner or later you invade the wrong home and find a shotgun. That's why I own a 12-gauge. Not just for my own protection, but to be just one more reason for people to not risk attacking my neighbors either (regardless of whether or not they own a gun, I don't know). I looked for the rates of home invasion, which I believe are increasing in Canada and the UK, but could not find them.
In 2003 there were 44,800 unintentional motor vehicle deaths in the U.S. I'm assuming that the number of intentional motor vehicle deaths is negligible. (http://www.nsc.org/library/report_injury_usa.htm) According to Wikipedia there were over 243 million passenger cars in the US.
In 2003 there were 30,136 gun deaths in the U.S. The majority - 56% - were from suicide. 40% were from homicide. And then there were 2% unintentional and 2% unknown. (http://www.ichv.org/Statistics.htm) There are over 200 million guns in the United States. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features /ihavearightto/four_b/casestudy_art29.shtml)
If you do the math, this means that cars - which, by the way, aren't intended to kill people, are more dangerous to American citizens than guns - which are designed to kill people. You should also consider that a lot (nobody knows how many) of the suicides and murders from guns would have been accomplished without guns anyway. Guns make it easier to kill, but they don't generally make people want to commit murder/suicide for no reason. And remember, the accidental gun death totals were less than 1,000 for all of 2003. So in terms of accidents there's not even a comparison between guns and cars: cars are more dangerous by orders of magnitude.
Oh yeah, and it's probably the car you own that is most likely to kill you too.
The truth is, it doesn't really matter if the fact is true or not. It's clearly supposed to give the impression that owning a gun is somehow dangerous, and by implication more dangerous than not owning a gun. But the following example (with completely made-up statistics) shows how the fact could be true, and still not be anti-gun at all.
20% of non-gun users are shot once in their lifetime (100% by guns they don't own/carry) 10% of gun-owners/carriers are shot once in their lifetime (55% by guns they do own/carry)
So if you own a gun (in this secnario) you have a 5.5% chance of being shot with it, a 4.5% chance of being shot with someone elses. If you don't own a gun, you have a 20% chance of being shot with someone elses. Which odds do you like better?
But another way: Sure, the gun you carry may be the most likely to shoot you, but it's entirely possible that this is because the gun someone else carries doesn't do them any good after you shoot them for breaking into your house.
The point is that it's just a worthless statistic that sounds scary without actually signifying anything.
-stormin
Re:A big waste, considering the commodity...
on
Encrypted Ammunition?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Perhaps a 2nd transmitter in a wrist band or ring on a finger, so there are 2 stages of security
I've always felt that was a particular weakness. There are two reasons someone would be firing someone else's gun. Either A- they stole it or B- they are fighting for it.
It seems to me that any security system that only accounts for A is pretty weak. If someone has the time to steal the gun, it's likely they may have the time to work around the security. Whereas if two people are scuffling for a gun and one of them is wearing the ring/watch/wristband then - as far as the gun knows - it's clear to shoot.
So you get a risk of the gun not shooting when you need it to on the con side, and the very narrow pro that if someone steals the gun but doesn't have time/know-how to bypass the security, they can't fire it. They can still fire it if they are fighting you for it or if they have a little bit of time to work on it.
I think this is the fundamental problem with your understanding of this issue:
That's reality. I, like you, prefer that meaning, but I, unlike you, am willing to accept reality as it is, and not pretend it is what I think it should be.
While you posit yourself as the world-wise man who is willing to accept reality and me, in contrast, as the semi-crazed and outmoded stodgy old-guard who just can't accept reality, the fact is that I'm the one who's embracing reality to a greater extent than you.
Consider your phrase: If people use a phrase, consistently, in a certain way, the phrase means what the usage implies, no matter what you believe.
If this is, in fact true, then all I have to do to "be right" is convince/educate people as to the genuine meaning. So one real distinction between the two of us is that you view the transformation as some kind of quasi-magical process that "just happens" whereas I consider it to be a change driven by human behavior and thus, to some degree, within my capacity to influence.
Of course if it really is true that in common usage "beg the question" means "raises the question" than I'm the one that is wrong. You're caught up in trying to prove a point that is obvious - and that I've moved beyond.
The trouble is that this is not obviously true. In the first case, you don't have any hard data about how many people believe one vs. the other. In the second place, it's not even obvious what that data would mean. It's not as though 51% of people prefering one definition to another makes one right and the other wrong. And further complicating the matter is the fact that it also matters who believes what. If you ask the "man on the street" to define metastatic and (let's just say) most of them say it means "a harmful kind of cancer" are they right? Do you honestly believe that if by a 10:1 ratio people believe "metastatic" refers to "a harmful kind of cancer" that all the MDs in the world are wrong? Clearly authority falls into the mix.
Of course you've already brought up the formal vs. in-formal dichotomy as a band-aid to your obviously flawed notion of linguistic ontology. In the first case, this provides only 2 types of meanings, which is blatantly false. "Metastatic", for example, has a different (and legitimate) usage in theology/philosophy. On top of that, it's not always clear which usage would be formal and which informal. Just based on a kind of class-status appeal you could say the definition prefered by those with higher education is formal, but what if the word in question is a technical term associated with uneducated (but skilled) labor? What if its college profs that misuse it and (say) sailors that get it right. Then which is "formal" and which is "informal".
Where does all this leave us?
1. The process of language evolution is interactive. Thus I may not have "authority" to say "you are wrong" when someone misuses the phrase "beg the question", but if I succeed in educating one person than - despite all your posturing about maturity - I've made the word that much more correct no matter what you say about my authority.
2. Language can not be reduced to binary values like formal/informal, right/wrong. There is room in the vocabulary (as with the term 'metastatic') for a word to have more than one specialized definition. The theological and medical definitions do not contradict, however, and therefore can cohabit nicely. The problem with the "begging the question" phrase is that people use it in the context of debate, argument, and logic. So you've got two definitions inhabiting the same (or overlapping) space. This means that you can not have both definitions without ambiguity - lessening the usefulness of both definitions. It'd be like someone without an MD walking into a hospital and telling the doctor "look, I've talked to the guys on the street, and we don't give a damn about your authority. We've taken a vote, and we've decided that 'metastatic' means 'nasty, m
It's really a difference of opinion at this point, and nothing more, but I don't think that the real meaning of "beg the question" is restricted to formal English. The idea of dividing English between formal and informal is just an artificial way to shroud some bad English under a guise of semi-legitimacy.
Slang is slang. You don't need to create a super-category for it (informal English) because it already has a category: slang. "Beg the question", I'd say, is not slang. It's just a misunderstood version of the plain old English phrase. Note that it's not a corrupted form (e.g. "ain't") nor is it an altogeher false word (e.g. "irregardless") nor is it in any other way bad grammar. So it's not slang, and it's not a violation of formal English rules. It's just a question of people not understanding the definition of the phrase: it's that simple.
I agree with this principle with one minor correction. Language is spoken by people - so really it is people that change language and not that language merely changes over time by itself. I'd say language doesn't exist outside of the context of those who use the language.
Take the word "irregardless". I don't care how many times I hear it - it drives me nuts and I attempt to correct everyone that says it. I say 'correct' because even though it is a common mistake it is still a mistake. And the more people harp on it being a mistake, the less chance that it will eventually become standardly accepted.
The same is true here. "Begging the questeion" may indeed be somewhere between meaning what it originally meant and meaning what the poster erroneously believed it to mean. But it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the corruption will eventually be standardized and accepted. So why bother to correct those who make the mistake? If language derives meaning only from communal consent, why shold X mean X any more than it should mean Y?
1. The phrase is useful, it's replacement is not (in my opinion). It's easy to say "that raises the question" or some other such phrase. This is a simple concept. Circular arguments are not as simple - and so having a simple (non Latin!) way to point them out is useful for those who like to argue and care about clear thinking. If the meaning of the word becomes corrupted, then I lose a valuable phrase that I happen to like to use.
2. The transition period is no good. In between meaning "a circular argument" and meaning "raising the question" the phrase will have no unambiguous meaning. If the choice between A or B is utterly irrelevant, but moving from A to B (or vice versa) is harmful - then logic dictates you stick with whatever you've got. Right now the correct meaning of "begging the question" refers to circular argments and I'd rather we move back to that direction and not away from it (into deeper ambiguity).
3. The reason we have synonyms is not that we like a lot of ways to say the same thing. It's useful for rhyming poetry and such, but I'd say fundamentally the richness of a language is not derived from redundancy but from subtle distinctions between similar words/phrases. Thus, as a general rule, if a phrase or word enteres the vernacular from specialty I think it enriches the vernacular only insofar as it maintains it's distinct meaning. For example "quantum leap" can easily be applied to non-physics situations, but it only adds something to the language if you keep in mind that it means "moving from one state to another without transition". Otherwise it becomes just another way to say "awesome", or "terrific", or "great", or "fantastic". Note, if you will, the rich varieties in these words that have been lost to our modern language. No one associates "awe" with "awesome" or "terror" with "terrific" - they're all more or less the same.
So you've got two options. If you care about language then you seek to employ it correctly and maintain the nuances of alternative expressions. If you don't, then you just go with the "majority rules" argument, and as a result inevitably lose a lot of the finer flavor of language.
I don't want to be a total grammar nazi or anything, but I do care enough about words and language that I'll always perfer usage that maintains the richness of our language rather than usage that - no matter how popular - gives us yet another way to say 'good'.
I find the other usage to be quite a strange one, and I wonder if it has anything to do with a misunderstanding about what "begging the question" actually means.
You're like the sane man who wondered into the asylum where the inmates are in charge. It is about a misunderstanding of what "begging the question" actually means, but the resident locals are insisting that if enough people misunderstand something than that means they are understanding it. You know, it's "true for them".
2. To say that a phrase is correct simply if enough people say so is problematic.
Do you really know that more than 50% of people use "question begging" incorrectly? Does it take a majority? How about if 30% of people use it wrong - is that enough to establish an alternate meaning? If so where are you going to draw the line? If I say "question begging" means "eating pineapple" who are you to say I'm wrong? That's what it means to me.
The point is that language only works in so far as it is communal. In that sense, allowing alternate meanings to phrases that already have specific meanings corrupts language. If we all know that X means X, then X has meaning. If, over time, we all decide that X really means Y, then X still has meaning and there's no confusion.
But if some people say X means X1 and others that it means X2 then we have issues. And if we know that when X was invented it meant X1, and all the people that really care about X a whole lot and study it know it means X1, and the only reason any one thinks it means X2 is that they didn't understand X1 - they it's foolish to say "X2 is also correct".
Your counter-example of "surf the net" is inapt. In the first place, this isn't a confusion of what "surf" means - it's a metaphor. To follow your logic we'd have to get rid of all metaphors from our language. But the fact is that metaphors work precisely because there's no ambiguity about what the word in question means. It's the same with any colloqialism. We all know what "beat a dead horse means", so there's no problem using it in a non-literal sense where there's no beating and no horse.
But if there's uncertaintly about what a phrase means, than you can't use it as effectively for anything. Everytime I say "begging the question" in an online argument I cringe because I know some people (30%? 50%? 70%?) are going to misunderstand me because they don't know what I'm saying. In my philosophy classes or talking with philosophy professors I use the term without ambiguity, but thanks to people who don't know what it means (aided and abetted by people who don't think carefully about language and meaning) the phrase is less useful both for those who know what it means and those who get it wrong.
This isn't really about grammar. As far as I can tell, it's about a specialist/technical phrase becoming poplarized. It makes sense that language rules that are generic can not really have any claim to "correctness" other than usage (e.g. if everyone says ending with prepositions is OK, by what rationale can you say this is not the case?), but I think it's different in the case of specific phrases that have specific meaning.
Take the phrase "quantum leap", for instance. This is a phrase from the new physics with a particular meaning. Here you go form wikipedia: In physics, a quantum leap or quantum jump is a change of an electron within an atom from one energy state to the next. This is a discontinuous change in which the electron goes from one energy level to another without passing through any intermediate levels
The idea is that it's a leap from one state to another without going through any of the intervening states. The phrase derives its meaning not from popular usage, but from physics. Even if every non-physicist in the world thinks "quantum leap" means "a really big change" they are (slightly) in corrrect. Whether or not the popular usage or the technical usage can ever be absolutely correc and the other absolutely wrong is up for debate, but I'd say there's an important way in which contradicting the technical meaning is just plain wrong.
There's a similar problem with "begging the question". Again from wikipedia: In logic, begging the question (also called petitio principii) has traditionally described a type of logical fallacy (classified as a material fallacy in the Aristotelian System) in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises ).Begging the question is related to the fallacy known as circular argument, circulus in probando, vicious circle or circular reasoning....
So you see this term has a specific, technical usage among logicians. Therefore no matter how many non-logicians use the term to mean "raises the question" or "begs for the question to be raised" they are in a very important sense uninformed and just plain wrong.
In any case, the old argument "everyone else is doing it" seems a pretty poor excuse for using a phrase incorrectly. It's wiser to just learn the correct meaning and use that.
Oh yeah, and while I'm spelling things out for you I might as well point out that I've actually gone even further than just saying "people can (for example) fight MS and AIDS". I've also implicitly allowed for some people caring more and opposing some issues more than others.
Just think about the formula I proposed (which is hardly mathematically rigorous, but still enlightening). Opposition = (degree of harm) * (influence). This means that it's perfectly reasonable for person A to be involved in, for example, opposition to factory farming (just go with me if you don't think that's something worth opposing) while person B is involved in opposition to, on the other hand, the human slave trade.
I'd say that the human slave trade is probably more damaging, but if person A has a much greater capacity to oppose factory farming or animal testing than it makes sense for him or her to do so, while if person B is about equally able to contribute to either problem, he or she should in general dedicate time to fighting the human slave trade.
The whole "if everyone in the world fights AIDS, what will MS do???" line of attack is really something you shouldn't have brought up until you really understood my post.
1. This article is about MS and their tactics, so one might expect a passionate response about MS.
Ever read Terry Pratchett? He's one of my favorites. The book I just finished by him was "Going Postal". In it one of the characters loves to collect pins. You know - the shiny metal things you use to temporarily hold fabric together. He's very involved in his pin-collecting, and even prints his own magazine dedicated to collecting and trading pins.
The point of this plot-line (other than to satirize stamp collectors) is that no matter how obscure something is you'll find people that are disproportionately obsessed with it. Yes, we're on a tech site. So yes, I may expect to find people that have lost all sense of balance, proportion and perspective when it comes to tech-related issues. But just being on a tech site doesn't make that loss of contact with reality any less irrational. Being on Slashdot doesn't alter the rules of the universe and suddenly make bashing MS of penultimate importance - it just makes some people feel that way.
2. If we all go fight AIDS, will Microsoft just sit around and do nothing?
One of my extreme pet-peeves with forums in general is when you realize an obvious counter-argument or possible misinterpretation of something you're posting, so you include a caveat to forestall wasted time on a question that does have a simple answer. Despite this obvious pro-active insertion, it's inevitable that some post-happy responder will utterly ignore your plain English and be like "did you think about X!?!?!" despite the fact that "I've considered X" is positively spelled out in the very post they are replying do.
Such is the case here.
I quite clearly stated: A - That just because some things are more important than MS doesn't mean we should ignore MS (e.g. "did you write about Darfur or MS more? Not saying you can't do both" is more or less verbatim from my post). B - That it's fine and dandy to fight MS, but my irritation is with people who go beyond rational opposition (e.g. not buying MS, supporting alternatives) and go into extremely cost-ineffective (by any measure) behavior such as content-free rants about MS on Slashdot. Really - who are you trying to convince? I use Open Office myself. I'm trying to get my office to use it (as I also wrote in my email). What part about this did you miss?
Anyway, I think I've about reached the point where arguing about the pointlessness of MS-bashing is, itself, becoming pointless. I just can't help reacting to this perverse useage of the word "evil" in application to sub-ethical behavior on the part of large corporations. Yes, they do behave badly. And we should oppose it when it's in our power to do so. But if MS is the paragon of evil to you, then clearly the word 'evil' has a very different usage for you than it does for me.
Cheerio, and have fun tilting at windmills all day long.
I've got no problem with getting a little perspective
Really? You've got no problem with getting a little perspective? Apparently your "bold" tags are just stuck to the on position then?
1. Do any of you seriously think MS is still going to be dominating the software world in a few decades? vs. Do you really think AIDS is still going to be rampant all over the world in a few decades?
The fact that you seem to think this is a fair comparison is exactly what I'm talking about. If MS is dominant for another 10 years - what happens? You pay too much for crappy software. That sucks. If AIDS is rampant for the next 10 years - what happens? A few million people die, a few million other children lose mother, or father, or both. And yet you seem to think these two problems are somehow of similar scope or magnitude?
Here's a simple test. How many times did you write to your senator about Darfur? How many times about MS or other tech-related issues? I'm not saying you have to do one or the other, but if you're sense of outrage is in anyway proportional to the events you're outraged about, and you're this pissed about MS, then I'd expect you to be going f***ing Rambo in Darfur by now.
2. "I've got no problem with getting a little perspective, I just feel that Microsoft should not be allowed to do these things, given their history as a company."
Do what things? Make bad software? That's within their rights. Sell it for too much? Again - anyone can sell whatever they want for any price. Doesn't mean we have to buy it. Abuse their monopoly go extort money out of the population? Oh, I think they shouldn't be allowed to do that. Apparently several nations agree. The company has been convicted of Anti-Competitave tactics multiple times in several countries. You see, your case would be a lot stronger if the company HADN'T already been convicted of anti-competitive behavior. They have. It was illegal, and they got caught. They're currently being sued by Symantec over similar issues.
3. Summation
3A - There are more important things than MS. A lot of them. 3B - No one is saying MS should get a "pass". What I'm saying is that opposition to a company/etc should be proportional to (1) the evil/damage/harm of that company and (2) the amount of influence you may have. It's a formula: opposition = (degree of harm) * (level of influence). The amount of harm for MS is orders of magnitude less than the real problems in the world. Your marginal level of influence is also minimal. You don't use MS. Woohoo. You post anti-MS stuff on Slashdot. Wow. I'm not saying that you're not having an effect - "marginal" in this context means "incremental". So, given that you don't use MS stuff and probably advise others not to - the amount of influence additional raving and ranting and bold postings of doom can have is minimal. Beyond the basics you're just wasting your energy and acting as a charicature of reasoned and temperate concerns for both MS in particular and proprietary software models in general.
You know, it'd be real nice if some of the anti-MS "break free of the stanglehold", "free the children", "fight the oppressors" enthusiasm around here was dedicated to something that really mattered. Like AIDS vaccines or potable water.
I'm a huge fan of OSS and I'm trying to get my company to adopt linux and/or open office. (I'm an analyst, not technically in the IS infrastructure, but since the IS infrastructure is one person and the entire company is just over 20 people - it may work.) But these are business decisions. What is more cost effective? OSS or MS or Apple? Not to mention the flavors of linux available. I just don't see morality or politics or "THE RESISTANCE!!!" entering into the discussion. Do any of you seriously think MS is still going to be dominating the software world in a few decades?
The people that see some kind of moral struggle here are just very strange to me. If the biggest evil you see in the world is MS trying to maintain market share by giving away a product (OF COURSE THERE ARE STRINGS ATTACHED!!! MS is a business!) then I have to wonder what kind of a warped world you live in.
I mean - get pissed about net neutrality, get pissed about DRM, get pissed about poverty, or crime, or education - but hating MS? I mean, come on.
I'm not defending MS here, I'm just asking for a little sense of perspective.
There's no way to point out how stupid this point is while being nice. Trust me, I've tried.
If an 8 year old walks up to by a ticket to see "The Omen" (or pick your random R-rated movie) what's the clerk going to do? Not sell it to him. Now if the 8 year old's mother walks up and buys two tickets (and even says "you're going to love this movie" out loud to her 8-year old son before buying the tickets) what's the clerk going to do? Sell her the damn tickets.
That's the whole point of these types of "content not suitable for children laws". Not to prevent children from every seeing stuff, but to ensure that A - they have to get parental permission and B - the parents know what kind of content (in general) they are giving permission to buy.
The parents shouting for regulations are the same ones that will buy any game their kid asks for regardless of rating.
Yeah, right. Some parents buy whatever for their kids. Those same parents may be surprised to find out that Johny's new game involves beating whores, but trust me, they are not the same ones that are already out there pressing for legislation. THOSE parents are the ones that scrutinize labels before purchasing stuff for their kids. You're just flat-out wrong on this one.
In the end they'll still curse the evil game industry for selling their kid a violent videogame and only writing "graphic violence, not suitable for persons under 18 years of age" on the box in big letters.
Yeah, but if Ms. Whomever buys the game for her son (and it's clearly labelled to be mature) then who's going to take her complaints seriously? Part of this law could be seen as just CYA for the games industry.
If you were referring only to the evidence in this particular article then I guess I jumped the gun. To clarify, I was referring to the type of thinking that you seemed to espouse (theory first, evidence second) and not to any particular aspect of this article. Even if it turns out that this was not a good example of the behavior in question, I'll consider it an argument poorly aimed as opposed to an argument poorly made.
So, to summarize, you believe in global warming you just have this one slight obstacle of not having any hard evidence to back it up? "Of course me theory is right! And once I find the evidence they'll all know it too!"
The biggest problem, in my opinion, with the global warming debate and other contentious scientific issues is that the role of evidence is being reversed. Evidence should come first, and from the evidence we form conclusions. The relative perceived veracity of a given theory should fluctuate according to how well it matches the evidence. To make a scientific metaphor: THE THEORY SHOULD BE THE DEPENDENT VARIABLE.
Instead we have rankorous partisans on both sides who have the conclusions first (probably based on politics and in turn on whatever a-rational reason most people have for their own politics) and simply want to use evidence as a persuasive tool to convince or a bludgeon to pontificate (not to mention the fundraising opportunities). Evidence becomes the slave to our theories when it should be the other way around. So, contrary to the way things should be, we act as though theory was the independent variable (choose your own theory) and then accept or reject evidence based on how well it supports the theory.
This is not good science, and it's even worse grounds for policy-making.
The most sickening part of it all is the way partisans are so frequenly caught making, as you have, bald assertions that they KNOW the truth, if only troublesome evidence would conform to their worldview! I know that partisans and opportunists (not to mention quacks and charlatans) are as much a part of human nature as anything - and we'll never get rid of them, but I kind of wish there was at least some measure of shame associated with being so brazenly hypocritical.
It's one thing to have some enterprising con selling snake oil, it's another to have a scientist, or at least someone who claims to think scientifically, selling magic tonic.
There is no root of my confusion. There are only annoying nitpickers who, in this case, don't even have a nit to pick.
It's not a question of confusing the barter system with giving away something for free.
Point 1: I've already said there is a price. I've stated it, emphasized it, restated it, and re-emphasized it. If you're still not seeing that, I can't help you.
Point 2: There's not even a barter system present at all. I mean, maybe I missed this but Google doesn't employ people with whom you may haggle over free email. There's a "price" to be paid - the price is one and the same for all. There is no negotiation, no haggling, and in short: no barter system.
I have already clarified my position. Google's services are free in the financial sense. No money changes hand. No material goods change hands. Period. They are not free in the absolute sense because an exchance does take place.
Not only have I clarified the distinction, but I've gone a step further and illustrated why this distinction is worth noting. If the distinction was "they don't require currency, they require precious metals" then it would not be worth noting since precious metals are about as hard to get a hold of as currency. The importance of the distinction lies in the fact that by simply requesting the ability to monitor how we use the free services they provide they are charging a price that EVERYONE CAN AFFORD. Not everyone thinks it's a good deal, but we can ALL AFFORD IT. This can not be said of any genuine financial price.
So please stop it with your silliness. This is not a question of bartering and no one every said non-material prices are free. The importance of the distinction - and the distinction - have been stated before and restated in this post. Try to understand.
I'm happy to respond to your posts with a more civil tone, but I lose patience easily with people who accuse me of saying "X" in a reply to my post where I have painstakingly state "not X". It only makes matters worse when they start babbling about things like the barter system that have no relevance whatsoever (not even a teensy bit) to the discussion at hand.
I may have turned some commonly-held belief on its head, but I've done no such thing to logic.
If you want to hold your senator accountable for a decision the best you can do (except in certain extreme cases) is... nothing. Unil the next election. Depending on the elected official this means you can do absolutely NOTHING for between 2 and 6 years. You call that accountable?
And even when the election does roll around your ability to hold one candidate accountable is strictly limited by the other candidate. If you hate Bush's wiretapping plan (just as an example) but you find the democratic opponenent even worse (because of some completely unrelated issue) then you are utterly without recourse. Some accountability.
Contrast this with companies. As part of American capitalist tradition we generally don't think of them as having to be accountable to the American public in a general sense. So I understand where you are coming from. But the fact remains that should a company annoy you you may have far more recourse to hold them accountable. If it's your utility company, you're kind of stuck (who will you turn to for electricity or water?) but in the case of Google you have ample alternatives for both free email and search (Google's headline products). You have the ability, as a consumer, to affect the bottom line of a company TODAY. There's no need to wait for an election. Furthermore you don't have to pick between one company or another. You can (in the cases I'm talking about) choose between a variety of companies or even choose none (if you don't vote - someone still gets elected, if no one buys tuna, tuna companies all go out of business).
Finally, there is absolutely no rule about logic whatsoever that says that gov't organizations are accountable. I've flipped a commonly accepted platitude on it's head (one that you apparently accept), not logic.
True, but you can have two companies, each with one or more monopolies, competing against one another.
This is nonsensical. Before things get any more ridiculous let's get back to basics. First: you have to define a market. In a given market, you can't have two monopolies. Period. That's just by definition. Of course you probably won't be able to construct a mathematically rigorous definition of "market", so there will always be some potential ambiguity - but that's a result of lack of definition of the term market, and nothing more.
So yes, you can have MS with a monopoly on desktop OSs and Google with a monopoly on search. And Ford with a monopoly on cars and Bic with a monopoly on pens. But the second any of these 4 companies competes with another it means that they've entered a market and so in that market there is no longer a monopoly. So if Google started a line of cars (and assuming they had enough success entering the market to be a significant alternative) than Ford no longer has a monopoly on cars because Google is competing.
So, to bring this all home, if Google launches a web-based OS and we define the market as "OSs" then MS no longer has a monopoloy on the OS market because no Google has a competing OS. It's a contradiction in terms to say that MS and Google both have monopolies in the same market.
I will grant you, the situation you mentioned (having Google with a monopoly on search and MS with a monopoly on OSs) is indeed worse. But the whole point of this article is Google entering MS domain via either office productivity or OS or both. So we're not really talking about consecutive monopolies (e.g. you can only buy a car from Ford and then you can only buy tires from Michelin) but about Google threatening to break into a market where MS currently holds (arguably) a monopoly. You can't talk clearly about monopolies without defining the market you're talking about.
Final statement. Monopoly doesn't necessarily mean that there's just 1 company. There are several hundred linux distros, there's unix, there's the BSDs, and there's Mac (just to name the major players). But if MS is so disproprotionately large relative to these minor players you still have (again, this is arguable) a monopoly.
...that the supposedly fundamental question of the article (what is Blizzard's secret sauce?) was never even remotely answered?
What a worthless waste of 10 minutes of my life. It was nothing but an overview of Blizzard's history, with a meaningless soundbite question at the very end.
It's "free (as in beer)" meaning: no money changes hands
It has a price in the sense that there is a non-monetary exchange.
How complicated is that? Furthermore the distinction is critical for this very simple reason. Everyone has the same amount of "personal info" to give away. Gmail doesn't give you 1 gig of mail if you promise to write to all of your friends and only 100MB if you only use it once a year. Everyone, everywhere, no matter how much money they have can get access. This is crucial. If you have a computer - you can get free email (searching, indexing of scholarly articles, etc.)
Whereas if it had a monetary price (which it doesn't) it could discriminate against those with fewer financial resources.
I'm sorry if that logic is too complicated for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd really like to see the study on this one. Not that I'm skeptical at all, I just think it's really interesting. Do you have a link? Author? Publication?
A thought, however, is this. Were the "fights" 1:1? How often do cops really get into fights with people 1:1? Just a thought.
-stormin
You always hope against experience that the slashdot mods aren't going to mod based on their politics, but it always happens. What's with the "overrated" mods anyway? I don't think I've ever given out a negative mod myself. The point is to find good points to mod up, not to piss on people's arguments if you feel offended. What good can come of downmodding?
Anyway, in the spirit of hunting for "overrated" mods, I found out that I had left out some additional interesting info I'm sure some doe-eyed liberal can take horrible offense at. It's a better response to the Kellermen quote I listed above than the one I included in my own post.
From wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the
I guess the lesson should be to beware of statistics. Take the car insurance stat you hear all the time. "Our users saved an average of x when they switched to us!" What does that really mean? It took an average savings of x to induce someone to switch. If you said "our users saved an average of 10,000 by switching!" what would that mean? Well first of all, it may be that only
But in the gun-rights debate, it seems that the "save the children" crowd are the ones most prone to either make up random statistics or misuse actual ones.
-stormin
I'm really not buying this. If the cop lets go of the gun, the guy is likely to shoot instantly. You're not going to go for a gun unless you're trying to shoot it (in general).
Even if the cop starts to get some distance, how exact is the radius of the RFID going to be? Depending on whether it's a ring or a watch or a bracelett, what clothes they're wearing, etc. there's no way to know how close you have to be in practice for the gun to be armed.
Besides, it's not like the cop can outrun the bullet or something.
-stormin
Let's make handguns look dangerous first. Then we can say:
Of course, there's no way to determine how many lives were actually saved by the presence of guns in the homes. Either a potential robber is an acquaintance of the home and doesn't want to rob where there are guns, or there's a posted "I have a gun" sign so a stranger is deterred, or there's just the general fact that criminals know that home invasion in the U.S. is like Russian roulette. Sooner or later you invade the wrong home and find a shotgun. That's why I own a 12-gauge. Not just for my own protection, but to be just one more reason for people to not risk attacking my neighbors either (regardless of whether or not they own a gun, I don't know). I looked for the rates of home invasion, which I believe are increasing in Canada and the UK, but could not find them.
In 2003 there were 44,800 unintentional motor vehicle deaths in the U.S. I'm assuming that the number of intentional motor vehicle deaths is negligible. (http://www.nsc.org/library/report_injury_usa.htm
In 2003 there were 30,136 gun deaths in the U.S. The majority - 56% - were from suicide. 40% were from homicide. And then there were 2% unintentional and 2% unknown. (http://www.ichv.org/Statistics.htm) There are over 200 million guns in the United States. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/feature
If you do the math, this means that cars - which, by the way, aren't intended to kill people, are more dangerous to American citizens than guns - which are designed to kill people. You should also consider that a lot (nobody knows how many) of the suicides and murders from guns would have been accomplished without guns anyway. Guns make it easier to kill, but they don't generally make people want to commit murder/suicide for no reason. And remember, the accidental gun death totals were less than 1,000 for all of 2003. So in terms of accidents there's not even a comparison between guns and cars: cars are more dangerous by orders of magnitude.
Oh yeah, and it's probably the car you own that is most likely to kill you too.
-stormin
The truth is, it doesn't really matter if the fact is true or not. It's clearly supposed to give the impression that owning a gun is somehow dangerous, and by implication more dangerous than not owning a gun. But the following example (with completely made-up statistics) shows how the fact could be true, and still not be anti-gun at all.
20% of non-gun users are shot once in their lifetime (100% by guns they don't own/carry)
10% of gun-owners/carriers are shot once in their lifetime (55% by guns they do own/carry)
So if you own a gun (in this secnario) you have a 5.5% chance of being shot with it, a 4.5% chance of being shot with someone elses. If you don't own a gun, you have a 20% chance of being shot with someone elses. Which odds do you like better?
But another way: Sure, the gun you carry may be the most likely to shoot you, but it's entirely possible that this is because the gun someone else carries doesn't do them any good after you shoot them for breaking into your house.
The point is that it's just a worthless statistic that sounds scary without actually signifying anything.
-stormin
I've always felt that was a particular weakness. There are two reasons someone would be firing someone else's gun. Either A- they stole it or B- they are fighting for it.
It seems to me that any security system that only accounts for A is pretty weak. If someone has the time to steal the gun, it's likely they may have the time to work around the security. Whereas if two people are scuffling for a gun and one of them is wearing the ring/watch/wristband then - as far as the gun knows - it's clear to shoot.
So you get a risk of the gun not shooting when you need it to on the con side, and the very narrow pro that if someone steals the gun but doesn't have time/know-how to bypass the security, they can't fire it. They can still fire it if they are fighting you for it or if they have a little bit of time to work on it.
I'm not impressed yet.
-stormin
I think this is the fundamental problem with your understanding of this issue:
That's reality. I, like you, prefer that meaning, but I, unlike you, am willing to accept reality as it is, and not pretend it is what I think it should be.
While you posit yourself as the world-wise man who is willing to accept reality and me, in contrast, as the semi-crazed and outmoded stodgy old-guard who just can't accept reality, the fact is that I'm the one who's embracing reality to a greater extent than you.
Consider your phrase: If people use a phrase, consistently, in a certain way, the phrase means what the usage implies, no matter what you believe.
If this is, in fact true, then all I have to do to "be right" is convince/educate people as to the genuine meaning. So one real distinction between the two of us is that you view the transformation as some kind of quasi-magical process that "just happens" whereas I consider it to be a change driven by human behavior and thus, to some degree, within my capacity to influence.
Of course if it really is true that in common usage "beg the question" means "raises the question" than I'm the one that is wrong. You're caught up in trying to prove a point that is obvious - and that I've moved beyond.
The trouble is that this is not obviously true. In the first case, you don't have any hard data about how many people believe one vs. the other. In the second place, it's not even obvious what that data would mean. It's not as though 51% of people prefering one definition to another makes one right and the other wrong. And further complicating the matter is the fact that it also matters who believes what. If you ask the "man on the street" to define metastatic and (let's just say) most of them say it means "a harmful kind of cancer" are they right? Do you honestly believe that if by a 10:1 ratio people believe "metastatic" refers to "a harmful kind of cancer" that all the MDs in the world are wrong? Clearly authority falls into the mix.
Of course you've already brought up the formal vs. in-formal dichotomy as a band-aid to your obviously flawed notion of linguistic ontology. In the first case, this provides only 2 types of meanings, which is blatantly false. "Metastatic", for example, has a different (and legitimate) usage in theology/philosophy. On top of that, it's not always clear which usage would be formal and which informal. Just based on a kind of class-status appeal you could say the definition prefered by those with higher education is formal, but what if the word in question is a technical term associated with uneducated (but skilled) labor? What if its college profs that misuse it and (say) sailors that get it right. Then which is "formal" and which is "informal".
Where does all this leave us?
1. The process of language evolution is interactive. Thus I may not have "authority" to say "you are wrong" when someone misuses the phrase "beg the question", but if I succeed in educating one person than - despite all your posturing about maturity - I've made the word that much more correct no matter what you say about my authority.
2. Language can not be reduced to binary values like formal/informal, right/wrong. There is room in the vocabulary (as with the term 'metastatic') for a word to have more than one specialized definition. The theological and medical definitions do not contradict, however, and therefore can cohabit nicely. The problem with the "begging the question" phrase is that people use it in the context of debate, argument, and logic. So you've got two definitions inhabiting the same (or overlapping) space. This means that you can not have both definitions without ambiguity - lessening the usefulness of both definitions. It'd be like someone without an MD walking into a hospital and telling the doctor "look, I've talked to the guys on the street, and we don't give a damn about your authority. We've taken a vote, and we've decided that 'metastatic' means 'nasty, m
It's really a difference of opinion at this point, and nothing more, but I don't think that the real meaning of "beg the question" is restricted to formal English. The idea of dividing English between formal and informal is just an artificial way to shroud some bad English under a guise of semi-legitimacy.
Slang is slang. You don't need to create a super-category for it (informal English) because it already has a category: slang. "Beg the question", I'd say, is not slang. It's just a misunderstood version of the plain old English phrase. Note that it's not a corrupted form (e.g. "ain't") nor is it an altogeher false word (e.g. "irregardless") nor is it in any other way bad grammar. So it's not slang, and it's not a violation of formal English rules. It's just a question of people not understanding the definition of the phrase: it's that simple.
-stormin
language is still always changing
I agree with this principle with one minor correction. Language is spoken by people - so really it is people that change language and not that language merely changes over time by itself. I'd say language doesn't exist outside of the context of those who use the language.
Take the word "irregardless". I don't care how many times I hear it - it drives me nuts and I attempt to correct everyone that says it. I say 'correct' because even though it is a common mistake it is still a mistake. And the more people harp on it being a mistake, the less chance that it will eventually become standardly accepted.
The same is true here. "Begging the questeion" may indeed be somewhere between meaning what it originally meant and meaning what the poster erroneously believed it to mean. But it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the corruption will eventually be standardized and accepted. So why bother to correct those who make the mistake? If language derives meaning only from communal consent, why shold X mean X any more than it should mean Y?
1. The phrase is useful, it's replacement is not (in my opinion). It's easy to say "that raises the question" or some other such phrase. This is a simple concept. Circular arguments are not as simple - and so having a simple (non Latin!) way to point them out is useful for those who like to argue and care about clear thinking. If the meaning of the word becomes corrupted, then I lose a valuable phrase that I happen to like to use.
2. The transition period is no good. In between meaning "a circular argument" and meaning "raising the question" the phrase will have no unambiguous meaning. If the choice between A or B is utterly irrelevant, but moving from A to B (or vice versa) is harmful - then logic dictates you stick with whatever you've got. Right now the correct meaning of "begging the question" refers to circular argments and I'd rather we move back to that direction and not away from it (into deeper ambiguity).
3. The reason we have synonyms is not that we like a lot of ways to say the same thing. It's useful for rhyming poetry and such, but I'd say fundamentally the richness of a language is not derived from redundancy but from subtle distinctions between similar words/phrases. Thus, as a general rule, if a phrase or word enteres the vernacular from specialty I think it enriches the vernacular only insofar as it maintains it's distinct meaning. For example "quantum leap" can easily be applied to non-physics situations, but it only adds something to the language if you keep in mind that it means "moving from one state to another without transition". Otherwise it becomes just another way to say "awesome", or "terrific", or "great", or "fantastic". Note, if you will, the rich varieties in these words that have been lost to our modern language. No one associates "awe" with "awesome" or "terror" with "terrific" - they're all more or less the same.
So you've got two options. If you care about language then you seek to employ it correctly and maintain the nuances of alternative expressions. If you don't, then you just go with the "majority rules" argument, and as a result inevitably lose a lot of the finer flavor of language.
I don't want to be a total grammar nazi or anything, but I do care enough about words and language that I'll always perfer usage that maintains the richness of our language rather than usage that - no matter how popular - gives us yet another way to say 'good'.
-stormin
I find the other usage to be quite a strange one, and I wonder if it has anything to do with a misunderstanding about what "begging the question" actually means.
You're like the sane man who wondered into the asylum where the inmates are in charge. It is about a misunderstanding of what "begging the question" actually means, but the resident locals are insisting that if enough people misunderstand something than that means they are understanding it. You know, it's "true for them".
Or whatever.
-stormin
1. I am not - nor was I - ridiculing anybody.
2. To say that a phrase is correct simply if enough people say so is problematic.
Do you really know that more than 50% of people use "question begging" incorrectly? Does it take a majority? How about if 30% of people use it wrong - is that enough to establish an alternate meaning? If so where are you going to draw the line? If I say "question begging" means "eating pineapple" who are you to say I'm wrong? That's what it means to me.
The point is that language only works in so far as it is communal. In that sense, allowing alternate meanings to phrases that already have specific meanings corrupts language. If we all know that X means X, then X has meaning. If, over time, we all decide that X really means Y, then X still has meaning and there's no confusion.
But if some people say X means X1 and others that it means X2 then we have issues. And if we know that when X was invented it meant X1, and all the people that really care about X a whole lot and study it know it means X1, and the only reason any one thinks it means X2 is that they didn't understand X1 - they it's foolish to say "X2 is also correct".
Your counter-example of "surf the net" is inapt. In the first place, this isn't a confusion of what "surf" means - it's a metaphor. To follow your logic we'd have to get rid of all metaphors from our language. But the fact is that metaphors work precisely because there's no ambiguity about what the word in question means. It's the same with any colloqialism. We all know what "beat a dead horse means", so there's no problem using it in a non-literal sense where there's no beating and no horse.
But if there's uncertaintly about what a phrase means, than you can't use it as effectively for anything. Everytime I say "begging the question" in an online argument I cringe because I know some people (30%? 50%? 70%?) are going to misunderstand me because they don't know what I'm saying. In my philosophy classes or talking with philosophy professors I use the term without ambiguity, but thanks to people who don't know what it means (aided and abetted by people who don't think carefully about language and meaning) the phrase is less useful both for those who know what it means and those who get it wrong.
-stormin
This isn't really about grammar. As far as I can tell, it's about a specialist/technical phrase becoming poplarized. It makes sense that language rules that are generic can not really have any claim to "correctness" other than usage (e.g. if everyone says ending with prepositions is OK, by what rationale can you say this is not the case?), but I think it's different in the case of specific phrases that have specific meaning.
...
Take the phrase "quantum leap", for instance. This is a phrase from the new physics with a particular meaning. Here you go form wikipedia: In physics, a quantum leap or quantum jump is a change of an electron within an atom from one energy state to the next. This is a discontinuous change in which the electron goes from one energy level to another without passing through any intermediate levels
The idea is that it's a leap from one state to another without going through any of the intervening states. The phrase derives its meaning not from popular usage, but from physics. Even if every non-physicist in the world thinks "quantum leap" means "a really big change" they are (slightly) in corrrect. Whether or not the popular usage or the technical usage can ever be absolutely correc and the other absolutely wrong is up for debate, but I'd say there's an important way in which contradicting the technical meaning is just plain wrong.
There's a similar problem with "begging the question". Again from wikipedia: In logic, begging the question (also called petitio principii) has traditionally described a type of logical fallacy (classified as a material fallacy in the Aristotelian System) in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises ).Begging the question is related to the fallacy known as circular argument, circulus in probando, vicious circle or circular reasoning.
So you see this term has a specific, technical usage among logicians. Therefore no matter how many non-logicians use the term to mean "raises the question" or "begs for the question to be raised" they are in a very important sense uninformed and just plain wrong.
In any case, the old argument "everyone else is doing it" seems a pretty poor excuse for using a phrase incorrectly. It's wiser to just learn the correct meaning and use that.
-stormin
Oh yeah, and while I'm spelling things out for you I might as well point out that I've actually gone even further than just saying "people can (for example) fight MS and AIDS". I've also implicitly allowed for some people caring more and opposing some issues more than others.
Just think about the formula I proposed (which is hardly mathematically rigorous, but still enlightening). Opposition = (degree of harm) * (influence). This means that it's perfectly reasonable for person A to be involved in, for example, opposition to factory farming (just go with me if you don't think that's something worth opposing) while person B is involved in opposition to, on the other hand, the human slave trade.
I'd say that the human slave trade is probably more damaging, but if person A has a much greater capacity to oppose factory farming or animal testing than it makes sense for him or her to do so, while if person B is about equally able to contribute to either problem, he or she should in general dedicate time to fighting the human slave trade.
The whole "if everyone in the world fights AIDS, what will MS do???" line of attack is really something you shouldn't have brought up until you really understood my post.
-stormin
Two things back at ya.
1. This article is about MS and their tactics, so one might expect a passionate response about MS.
Ever read Terry Pratchett? He's one of my favorites. The book I just finished by him was "Going Postal". In it one of the characters loves to collect pins. You know - the shiny metal things you use to temporarily hold fabric together. He's very involved in his pin-collecting, and even prints his own magazine dedicated to collecting and trading pins.
The point of this plot-line (other than to satirize stamp collectors) is that no matter how obscure something is you'll find people that are disproportionately obsessed with it. Yes, we're on a tech site. So yes, I may expect to find people that have lost all sense of balance, proportion and perspective when it comes to tech-related issues. But just being on a tech site doesn't make that loss of contact with reality any less irrational. Being on Slashdot doesn't alter the rules of the universe and suddenly make bashing MS of penultimate importance - it just makes some people feel that way.
2. If we all go fight AIDS, will Microsoft just sit around and do nothing?
One of my extreme pet-peeves with forums in general is when you realize an obvious counter-argument or possible misinterpretation of something you're posting, so you include a caveat to forestall wasted time on a question that does have a simple answer. Despite this obvious pro-active insertion, it's inevitable that some post-happy responder will utterly ignore your plain English and be like "did you think about X!?!?!" despite the fact that "I've considered X" is positively spelled out in the very post they are replying do.
Such is the case here.
I quite clearly stated: A - That just because some things are more important than MS doesn't mean we should ignore MS (e.g. "did you write about Darfur or MS more? Not saying you can't do both" is more or less verbatim from my post). B - That it's fine and dandy to fight MS, but my irritation is with people who go beyond rational opposition (e.g. not buying MS, supporting alternatives) and go into extremely cost-ineffective (by any measure) behavior such as content-free rants about MS on Slashdot. Really - who are you trying to convince? I use Open Office myself. I'm trying to get my office to use it (as I also wrote in my email). What part about this did you miss?
Anyway, I think I've about reached the point where arguing about the pointlessness of MS-bashing is, itself, becoming pointless. I just can't help reacting to this perverse useage of the word "evil" in application to sub-ethical behavior on the part of large corporations. Yes, they do behave badly. And we should oppose it when it's in our power to do so. But if MS is the paragon of evil to you, then clearly the word 'evil' has a very different usage for you than it does for me.
Cheerio, and have fun tilting at windmills all day long.
-stormin
I've got no problem with getting a little perspective
Really? You've got no problem with getting a little perspective? Apparently your "bold" tags are just stuck to the on position then?
1. Do any of you seriously think MS is still going to be dominating the software world in a few decades? vs. Do you really think AIDS is still going to be rampant all over the world in a few decades?
The fact that you seem to think this is a fair comparison is exactly what I'm talking about. If MS is dominant for another 10 years - what happens? You pay too much for crappy software. That sucks. If AIDS is rampant for the next 10 years - what happens? A few million people die, a few million other children lose mother, or father, or both. And yet you seem to think these two problems are somehow of similar scope or magnitude?
Here's a simple test. How many times did you write to your senator about Darfur? How many times about MS or other tech-related issues? I'm not saying you have to do one or the other, but if you're sense of outrage is in anyway proportional to the events you're outraged about, and you're this pissed about MS, then I'd expect you to be going f***ing Rambo in Darfur by now.
2. "I've got no problem with getting a little perspective, I just feel that Microsoft should not be allowed to do these things, given their history as a company."
Do what things? Make bad software? That's within their rights. Sell it for too much? Again - anyone can sell whatever they want for any price. Doesn't mean we have to buy it. Abuse their monopoly go extort money out of the population? Oh, I think they shouldn't be allowed to do that. Apparently several nations agree. The company has been convicted of Anti-Competitave tactics multiple times in several countries. You see, your case would be a lot stronger if the company HADN'T already been convicted of anti-competitive behavior. They have. It was illegal, and they got caught. They're currently being sued by Symantec over similar issues.
3. Summation
3A - There are more important things than MS. A lot of them.
3B - No one is saying MS should get a "pass". What I'm saying is that opposition to a company/etc should be proportional to (1) the evil/damage/harm of that company and (2) the amount of influence you may have. It's a formula: opposition = (degree of harm) * (level of influence). The amount of harm for MS is orders of magnitude less than the real problems in the world. Your marginal level of influence is also minimal. You don't use MS. Woohoo. You post anti-MS stuff on Slashdot. Wow. I'm not saying that you're not having an effect - "marginal" in this context means "incremental". So, given that you don't use MS stuff and probably advise others not to - the amount of influence additional raving and ranting and bold postings of doom can have is minimal. Beyond the basics you're just wasting your energy and acting as a charicature of reasoned and temperate concerns for both MS in particular and proprietary software models in general.
The world doesn't need this help.
-stormin
You know, it'd be real nice if some of the anti-MS "break free of the stanglehold", "free the children", "fight the oppressors" enthusiasm around here was dedicated to something that really mattered. Like AIDS vaccines or potable water.
I'm a huge fan of OSS and I'm trying to get my company to adopt linux and/or open office. (I'm an analyst, not technically in the IS infrastructure, but since the IS infrastructure is one person and the entire company is just over 20 people - it may work.) But these are business decisions. What is more cost effective? OSS or MS or Apple? Not to mention the flavors of linux available. I just don't see morality or politics or "THE RESISTANCE!!!" entering into the discussion. Do any of you seriously think MS is still going to be dominating the software world in a few decades?
The people that see some kind of moral struggle here are just very strange to me. If the biggest evil you see in the world is MS trying to maintain market share by giving away a product (OF COURSE THERE ARE STRINGS ATTACHED!!! MS is a business!) then I have to wonder what kind of a warped world you live in.
I mean - get pissed about net neutrality, get pissed about DRM, get pissed about poverty, or crime, or education - but hating MS? I mean, come on.
I'm not defending MS here, I'm just asking for a little sense of perspective.
-stormin
There's no way to point out how stupid this point is while being nice. Trust me, I've tried.
If an 8 year old walks up to by a ticket to see "The Omen" (or pick your random R-rated movie) what's the clerk going to do? Not sell it to him. Now if the 8 year old's mother walks up and buys two tickets (and even says "you're going to love this movie" out loud to her 8-year old son before buying the tickets) what's the clerk going to do? Sell her the damn tickets.
That's the whole point of these types of "content not suitable for children laws". Not to prevent children from every seeing stuff, but to ensure that A - they have to get parental permission and B - the parents know what kind of content (in general) they are giving permission to buy.
The parents shouting for regulations are the same ones that will buy any game their kid asks for regardless of rating.
Yeah, right. Some parents buy whatever for their kids. Those same parents may be surprised to find out that Johny's new game involves beating whores, but trust me, they are not the same ones that are already out there pressing for legislation. THOSE parents are the ones that scrutinize labels before purchasing stuff for their kids. You're just flat-out wrong on this one.
In the end they'll still curse the evil game industry for selling their kid a violent videogame and only writing "graphic violence, not suitable for persons under 18 years of age" on the box in big letters.
Yeah, but if Ms. Whomever buys the game for her son (and it's clearly labelled to be mature) then who's going to take her complaints seriously? Part of this law could be seen as just CYA for the games industry.
-stormin
If you were referring only to the evidence in this particular article then I guess I jumped the gun. To clarify, I was referring to the type of thinking that you seemed to espouse (theory first, evidence second) and not to any particular aspect of this article. Even if it turns out that this was not a good example of the behavior in question, I'll consider it an argument poorly aimed as opposed to an argument poorly made.
-stormin
So, to summarize, you believe in global warming you just have this one slight obstacle of not having any hard evidence to back it up? "Of course me theory is right! And once I find the evidence they'll all know it too!"
The biggest problem, in my opinion, with the global warming debate and other contentious scientific issues is that the role of evidence is being reversed. Evidence should come first, and from the evidence we form conclusions. The relative perceived veracity of a given theory should fluctuate according to how well it matches the evidence. To make a scientific metaphor: THE THEORY SHOULD BE THE DEPENDENT VARIABLE.
Instead we have rankorous partisans on both sides who have the conclusions first (probably based on politics and in turn on whatever a-rational reason most people have for their own politics) and simply want to use evidence as a persuasive tool to convince or a bludgeon to pontificate (not to mention the fundraising opportunities). Evidence becomes the slave to our theories when it should be the other way around. So, contrary to the way things should be, we act as though theory was the independent variable (choose your own theory) and then accept or reject evidence based on how well it supports the theory.
This is not good science, and it's even worse grounds for policy-making.
The most sickening part of it all is the way partisans are so frequenly caught making, as you have, bald assertions that they KNOW the truth, if only troublesome evidence would conform to their worldview! I know that partisans and opportunists (not to mention quacks and charlatans) are as much a part of human nature as anything - and we'll never get rid of them, but I kind of wish there was at least some measure of shame associated with being so brazenly hypocritical.
It's one thing to have some enterprising con selling snake oil, it's another to have a scientist, or at least someone who claims to think scientifically, selling magic tonic.
-stormin
He said "lost". Lost usually means there's nothing to replace.
-stormin
There is no root of my confusion. There are only annoying nitpickers who, in this case, don't even have a nit to pick.
It's not a question of confusing the barter system with giving away something for free.
Point 1: I've already said there is a price. I've stated it, emphasized it, restated it, and re-emphasized it. If you're still not seeing that, I can't help you.
Point 2: There's not even a barter system present at all. I mean, maybe I missed this but Google doesn't employ people with whom you may haggle over free email. There's a "price" to be paid - the price is one and the same for all. There is no negotiation, no haggling, and in short: no barter system.
I have already clarified my position. Google's services are free in the financial sense. No money changes hand. No material goods change hands. Period. They are not free in the absolute sense because an exchance does take place.
Not only have I clarified the distinction, but I've gone a step further and illustrated why this distinction is worth noting. If the distinction was "they don't require currency, they require precious metals" then it would not be worth noting since precious metals are about as hard to get a hold of as currency. The importance of the distinction lies in the fact that by simply requesting the ability to monitor how we use the free services they provide they are charging a price that EVERYONE CAN AFFORD. Not everyone thinks it's a good deal, but we can ALL AFFORD IT. This can not be said of any genuine financial price.
So please stop it with your silliness. This is not a question of bartering and no one every said non-material prices are free. The importance of the distinction - and the distinction - have been stated before and restated in this post. Try to understand.
I'm happy to respond to your posts with a more civil tone, but I lose patience easily with people who accuse me of saying "X" in a reply to my post where I have painstakingly state "not X". It only makes matters worse when they start babbling about things like the barter system that have no relevance whatsoever (not even a teensy bit) to the discussion at hand.
-stormin
I may have turned some commonly-held belief on its head, but I've done no such thing to logic.
If you want to hold your senator accountable for a decision the best you can do (except in certain extreme cases) is... nothing. Unil the next election. Depending on the elected official this means you can do absolutely NOTHING for between 2 and 6 years. You call that accountable?
And even when the election does roll around your ability to hold one candidate accountable is strictly limited by the other candidate. If you hate Bush's wiretapping plan (just as an example) but you find the democratic opponenent even worse (because of some completely unrelated issue) then you are utterly without recourse. Some accountability.
Contrast this with companies. As part of American capitalist tradition we generally don't think of them as having to be accountable to the American public in a general sense. So I understand where you are coming from. But the fact remains that should a company annoy you you may have far more recourse to hold them accountable. If it's your utility company, you're kind of stuck (who will you turn to for electricity or water?) but in the case of Google you have ample alternatives for both free email and search (Google's headline products). You have the ability, as a consumer, to affect the bottom line of a company TODAY. There's no need to wait for an election. Furthermore you don't have to pick between one company or another. You can (in the cases I'm talking about) choose between a variety of companies or even choose none (if you don't vote - someone still gets elected, if no one buys tuna, tuna companies all go out of business).
Finally, there is absolutely no rule about logic whatsoever that says that gov't organizations are accountable. I've flipped a commonly accepted platitude on it's head (one that you apparently accept), not logic.
-stormin
True, but you can have two companies, each with one or more monopolies, competing against one another.
This is nonsensical. Before things get any more ridiculous let's get back to basics. First: you have to define a market. In a given market, you can't have two monopolies. Period. That's just by definition. Of course you probably won't be able to construct a mathematically rigorous definition of "market", so there will always be some potential ambiguity - but that's a result of lack of definition of the term market, and nothing more.
So yes, you can have MS with a monopoly on desktop OSs and Google with a monopoly on search. And Ford with a monopoly on cars and Bic with a monopoly on pens. But the second any of these 4 companies competes with another it means that they've entered a market and so in that market there is no longer a monopoly. So if Google started a line of cars (and assuming they had enough success entering the market to be a significant alternative) than Ford no longer has a monopoly on cars because Google is competing.
So, to bring this all home, if Google launches a web-based OS and we define the market as "OSs" then MS no longer has a monopoloy on the OS market because no Google has a competing OS. It's a contradiction in terms to say that MS and Google both have monopolies in the same market.
I will grant you, the situation you mentioned (having Google with a monopoly on search and MS with a monopoly on OSs) is indeed worse. But the whole point of this article is Google entering MS domain via either office productivity or OS or both. So we're not really talking about consecutive monopolies (e.g. you can only buy a car from Ford and then you can only buy tires from Michelin) but about Google threatening to break into a market where MS currently holds (arguably) a monopoly. You can't talk clearly about monopolies without defining the market you're talking about.
Final statement. Monopoly doesn't necessarily mean that there's just 1 company. There are several hundred linux distros, there's unix, there's the BSDs, and there's Mac (just to name the major players). But if MS is so disproprotionately large relative to these minor players you still have (again, this is arguable) a monopoly.
-stormin
...that the supposedly fundamental question of the article (what is Blizzard's secret sauce?) was never even remotely answered?
What a worthless waste of 10 minutes of my life. It was nothing but an overview of Blizzard's history, with a meaningless soundbite question at the very end.
Pathetic.
-stormin
I'll simply the alleged "incoherence".
It's "free (as in beer)" meaning: no money changes hands
It has a price in the sense that there is a non-monetary exchange.
How complicated is that? Furthermore the distinction is critical for this very simple reason. Everyone has the same amount of "personal info" to give away. Gmail doesn't give you 1 gig of mail if you promise to write to all of your friends and only 100MB if you only use it once a year. Everyone, everywhere, no matter how much money they have can get access. This is crucial. If you have a computer - you can get free email (searching, indexing of scholarly articles, etc.)
Whereas if it had a monetary price (which it doesn't) it could discriminate against those with fewer financial resources.
I'm sorry if that logic is too complicated for you.
-stormin