Google's cache is basically a large-scale financial transfer from the copyrightholders (who serve to benefit from the ads they serve and other interaction they get from end-users visitng their site) to google, who benefits directly by keeping people longer on google's site and thus, basically, shucks them more ads.
Uh, no.
I use regular links (which don't have highlighting and the Google thingie that the top) unless the regular link isn't available. So *if* the ads are available, I'm hitting them anyway. Well, actually I'm not, because my browser filters them out, but whatever.
Plus, anyone can set up a cache. There's nothing special about Google versus, say, you, except that Google is helping me out by providing me with archived, otherwise unavailable data and you aren't.
or he'll simply keep it to himself and no-one will benefit under any circumstances.
Yup. And yet, somehow, there is far more content on the Internet than I could ever see in a lifetime of browsing. Sorry, but no sympathy here.\
That's a discussion for another time, perhaps, but just consider how many crimes, from the somewhat irritating to the seriously damaging, are possible only because of the effective anonymity the Internet provides. Again, that's not to say that some don't benefit, but IMHO most of the benefits are illusory, while the damage from spam, viruses, phishing and on-line fraud, and countless other things is very real.
That's a straw man argument. None of these are directly facilitated by Google Cache.
1. The cache removes content control away from the author. For example, a site like EzineArticles.com prevents scraping by using an IP blocking method based on the speed at which pages are spidered by that IP. It is absurdly easy to circumvent this by simply spidering the Google cache of that article instead of spidering the site. Google's IP blocking is far less restrictive, and combined with the powerful search tool, it allows for easy, anonymous contextual scraping of sites whose Terms of Service explicitly refuse it.
Yup. EzineArticles.com is abusing HTTP. It's not supposed to do that (and I could think of many valid systems, like prefetching, that could potentially trigger this). There are some correct systems that will break with their scheme. That's their fault.
I don't care *what* someone's ToS says. If you need a ToS, then you can't allow anonymous access. Simple as that. The benefit to the Web of caching being allowed vastly outweighs the benefit to the Web of everyone having their own halfassed ToS schemes. Anything else vastly reduces the ability of a computer to deal with the Web in an automated fashion -- computers can't read legalese.
2. The cache extends access to removed content, often for months if not years at a time. Google rarely replaces 404 pages (perhaps it is because of their wish to have the largest number of indexed pages). I have clients who have nearly 48,000 non existent pages still cached in google that have not been present in over 14 months. Despite using 404s, 301s, etc. these pages have not yet been removed. Furthermore, Google's often mishandling of robots.txt, nocache, and nofollow leaves webmasters dependent upon search traffic hesitant to force removal of these pages using the supposedly standardized methods of removal.
I've yet to hear of problems with Google's handling of these, and Google *does* provide a link to the current page. Why should Google take down 404 pages? I *hate* getting 404s. It drives me up a wall. But sometimes, when I get one, I can go back to the Wayback Engine or Google Cache and actually see the page.
3. The cache allows Google to serve site content anonymously. Don't want the owner of a site to know you are looking at their goods (think of companies grepping for competitor IPs), just watch the cache instead.
A) I don't sympathize with people who expect to be able to glean information from monitoring everyone reading content. B) There are a thousand ways to do this that don't involve Google. This argument is already lost.
Now, a web author must know how to manipulate HTML meta tags and/or a robots.txt file.
Such is the price of progress. If he doesn't like that, he can have a tool that does it.
Fair use is for users, for people, not multi-billion dollar companies.
You mean *other* than that the movies in this list made by Disney are almost all retellings of public-domain stories (yes, public domain -- that awful fate of stories that Disney tries to help Congress save their own content from)? Well, aside from the one that they just outright stole, of course.
That film is great, and completely blows away most of their other recent films for sheer style, verve and originality --- I reckon it's better than The Lion King, which suffered rather from the Disney over-earnestness.
The sad thing is that it's "okay" for Disney to swipe someone's work to make hundreds of millions of dollars.
But if you swipe a copy of a Disney movie...well, then Disney needs every ounce of legislative support it can *get* from Congress to squash you. After all, you're preventing *creative artists from getting their dues*.
Eisner not only saved Disney financially, but built it into the huge, powerful media corporation it is today.
You know, I'm not saying that Eisner might not have had some important ideas or insights, but the idea that any CEO does something like this is absurd. Yes, business rags like to make statements like this, to glorify high-level execs, but the idea that the thousands of people who *aren't* the CEO were just sitting around directionless when the new CEO walked in and personally made everything better is absurd. There were business development people out closing new deals, animators producing better products...the whole mass of people. What's more, it's a pretty safe bet that the CEO you just slapped in, who doesn't have the years of experience with the company and industry that other people already there do, isn't going to be likely to singlehandedly do much.
I'm not saying that the CEO doesn't do anything, but he's one administrator in a very large pool.
What the CEO *is* good for is PR value. Bad couple of years in a publically-owned company and the shareholders are getting cranky? Kick out the CEO, take an artificially inflated "one-time restructuring charge" that you separate when talking about your profits ("Hey, it was just a one-time thing, you know?"), do some creative accounting to funnel that overstated loss into "profit" the next couple quarters (which keeps the shareholders off your back for a while while you try some other things and hope that the market improves), declare that the CEO is a brilliant success who has solved the company's problems, and then hang onto him until the next time that you need a scapegoat. He knows the risks of the job and goes with a golden parachute (without which he wouldn't have put himself in the position of sacrificial lamb). Repeat as needed.
It never occured to me that all those fairy tales they turned into movies were public domain. I always wondered who they paid to get the legal rights to all that material. Obviously, no one. Mouse ear wearing bastards.
Yes, but said choice has some pretty wonky proposals (item II.2 on their party platform):
Taxation All persons are entitled to keep the fruits of their labor. We oppose all government activity that consists of the forcible collection of money or goods from individuals in violation of their individual rights.
You want to try running a country with no funding? Good luck.
II.6 on said platform:
Monopolies Government is the source of monopoly, through its grants of legal privilege to special interests in the economy. We advocate a strict separation of business and State.
Oh, nonsense. Goverment might be able to produce monpolies, but if the Libertarian Party simply disbelieves that natural monopolies exist, I can't wait for *their* enlightening explanation. Hell, a lot of the time the state grants monopolies, it's because it's a situation where you have a natural monopoly *already* and we'd rather have a regulated monopoly than an unregulated one. Power distribution is going to be a monopoly, because *nobody* is going to run a second set of lines to your house, and lines are owned in per-line increments. Given that you have a monopoly, you can at least regulate it to keep it from doing some of the nasty things it can do.
Just because free markets are a powerful tool doesn't mean that they are the answer to every problem in a system.
I like some things that libertarians push -- voting reform for one, because the current scheme seems to achieve stability with two parties, which I don't think is good. I like the idea of less military aggression -- I think that most of the time, if you have a lot of pissed off people who have finally come to blows, sending lots of other people in with guns and killing off some more people generally isn't a very effective long-term solution. I wish that a lot of America was a lot more socially liberal too, because I think that they'd be a lot happier.
But, ultimately, a hell of a lot of libertarianism seems to come down to one of a couple points:
1) Someone's discovered that free markets are a really cool tool, and decides that maximally applying them everywhere is the best possible way to make society function better.
2) Someone notices that most of the things that the federal government does are unconsitutional, and decides that the best way to resolve the mentally-irritating difference is to drastically cut back the powers of the federal government.
3) Someone gets fed up over corruption or some other difficult-to-solve problem, can't come up with a convincing fix, and decides that the best way to solve the problem is just to erase the current political structures (D & R) and start over, hoping that this time, the social ill will just not appear.
Now, granted, I'm sure that people have latched onto D or R for reasons that I'd find just as uncompelling...
1. Your brain uncritically accepts the first information it gets in any new subject area as correct, whether it is or not. 2. Subsequent information that is in keeping with the information already present in your brain is uncritically accepted as correct, whether it is or not. 3. A new item that is contradictory to the information present in your brain is automatically rejected as incorrect, whether it is or not. 4. Your brain considers every item that is compatible with the majority of its information in a given subject area to be correct and every item that is contradictory to its information to be incorrect. As a result, the brain has no internal way to know which items of its information are correct representations of the real world and which are not.
I'd say that 1-4 can be condensed and put much more accurately as the following: knowledge is accepted based on how well it fits with other knowledge.
Take a kid, take him to church and keep shoveling him full of stories about invisible beings who hate gays and how he should be responsible and give money to his church, and at every point from then on, he has to manage to build up enough conflicting information to completely overturn his previous worldview. Tell him that he needs to study the Bible and attend church regularly to guarantee continuous input supporting the view you are trying to impart, and you have a very stable system established. Tell him how he should teach *his* kids the same thing, and you get to utilize the trust that children learn to have in their parents when they learn that their parents know more than they do early on.
Scientology and Jim Jones' cult both used the technique of isolating a victim and trying to bombard them with messages supporting their claims.
5 Your brain has no way to know whether or not it has all the information required to respond appropriately to a given stimulus. 6 Unless your brain has additional information to the contrary, it interprets similar items as being identical. 7 Your brain cannot measure anything directly. All measurements must be made by comparison against an appropriate standard, which is often done incorrectly. 8 Your brain continues to interpret the external world as it was when the last sensory signal about a given subject area was received. As a result, the brain is not aware that some of its formerly correct information is now incorrect.
I dunno about the value of 5-8. 5 seems obvious, 6 overly-strong (the mind does fuzzy matching...is that what this is trying to say?), and 7 and 8 not very useful -- yes, if you have no information that would lead you to know X, then you probably aren't going to know X.
I've personally found it in information search experiments: people will focus on what confirms what they want to see rather than what is there; it often leads to disappointment and resentment.
I think that it's more that people will believe what fits better with what they already believe.
Some Christians, for example, might have a visceral reaction to the presentation of logical or scientific errors in the Bible; but at the same time, a non-believer would have a similar response to a believer's unshakable claim to a real spiritual presence in his or her life. In both cases the believer and non-believer are faced with information that threatens their ideas of the constitution of reality. But they're more than ideas. These beliefs are part of the fabric of each person's world -- they are the frame for experiencing and understanding space and time. Threats to faith (in God's existence or his absence) threaten one's sense of well-being.
I don't think that this comparison is the same.
The existence of God (for the fraction of a percent of people who are really thinking about the question) is entirely a metaphysical question.
The fact that people don't like challenges to their way of thinking is an artifact of the way we evaluate truth -- we compare new statements to what we already know, and see how well they explain what we've seen.
If you indoctrinate someone in something for years and then feed them a new fact that conflicts with what they've learned, their brain is going to recoil (unless that new fact suddenly fits with their existing set of knowledge better than the entire set of nonsense that they've been fed up until this point). That new fact is going to be judged the conflicting item.
I dunno. I'd say that the first real social thing I looked up was "grunge", and found that WP's article and discussion was much more useful than anything else out there. I've almost never had good overview-level packets of information on social phenomena.
I've read an awful lot of European history on Wikipedia, and have been impressed with it.
I've read through the US Presidential biographies, starting with Washington. I liked reading them.
I've found that the information on US states, counties, and cities to be excellent.
Actually, if you take WP as a whole, I'd say that it's very good. It will always have warts of one sort or another, but it's better than anything else out there.
I don't understand why people like Futurama so much. I've tried over and over to get into it. My friends love it. It just isn't funny, though. I laugh at Family Guy, and I like (well, liked back in the day...haven't watched it for a very long time) the Simpsons, but I just don't see the appeal of Futurama.
For example, I remember one episode where the characters were on a planet with robots, and the robots were trying to build a building. They dropped a new chunk of building in, and it completed a "tetris line" and part of the building disappeared. My friends thought that it was uproariously funny, but I just didn't understand where the humor came from.
The show never really became enough of a drama for me to empathize with the characters (maybe if the episodes were longer...I don't know), and there just wasn't much humor that I could see.
A good chunk of the show seemed to be simply having the characters act out stereotypes -- the spineless sidekick, the ditzy teen, the bitter jerk, and so forth -- and given how many of the lines were spent on reinforcing those stereotypes, I would imagine that some people had to find the fact that Fry was such a klutz funny...but it just never tickled my sense of humor.
I'll grant that graphically, the show was impressive -- the cel-shaded 3D rendering and the much-beloved Groening style. I just couldn't understand why people liked the writing.
Absolutely. You two said it. I *loved* Family Guy at first, and that is the single worst thing that happened to the series.
The other thing that got old was jokes involving Peter where the humor was supposed to derive from how long the joke was. An example would be Peter saying something to someone ("I'll bet you like hamburger"), then waiting for maybe five seconds and blinking while looking at that person. Then he'd say something to them with a sly grin ("C'mon, I'll bet you really like it"), then he'd go back to standing there. Repeat about four or five more times. I thought that one great thing about Family Guy was how quickly the humor kept coming -- you'd just be getting one joke when the scene would change, and other would be thrown in, and this was a deviation from that.
A couple years ago, CMU tried scanning for students with CIFS servers with simple passwords containing potentially-copyrighted files. I was somewhat perturbed by this.
Similarly, I was going to mention that, if/when credit completely replaces money it will probably be safer to use, hygienically. That's pretty much irrelevant now, but I'm still saying it because I feel that it's important.
In Oregon and New Jersey, self service gas pumps are illegal. I've always wondered whether that helps reduce disease vectors -- I mean, people fueling up are possibly travelling on the roadway from a long ways away. I'd imagine that gas pump handles are pretty darn unsanitary.
http://www.easternstorm.net/, as linked to in your URL, has an animated splash screen followed by what seems to be a broken page -- when I roll my mouse over chunks of the flash in the "WHEN" box, I get strange boxes appearing over the text and leaving chunks of the text overwritten. The "skip intro" button works, but nothing else seems to (like the "Continue" button) (though I'll grant that given the previous website posted as a response, probably something is just misconfigured on my machine, though I didn't have trouble with homestarrunner). The text in the "Cover" and "Site" sections is not selectable -- and this is a site where I might want to copy event information.
If there's drag-and-drop or some feature which Flash is crucial to implement, I'm not sure what it is.
I gave the two linked-to websites a look -- hey, I'll grant that at least theoretically, Flash could be useful. It's just that my experience with it in the real world has been pretty universally negative.
I tried this ferryhalim place, and saw a penguin game. I like Tux, so I decided to try that one. I think that the point of it is to put the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen and click as fast as you can. I mean, I'll grant that I *have* played minigames in commercial videogames that simply measured how quickly you could smack a button, so I can't claim that this sort of thing has never been done, but it just doesn't come off as that impressive or fun to me.
I'm willing to grant that maybe some of the games there are better than others, but there's a huge grid of games -- I don't want to dig through all of them.
As for the fcukstar.com place -- I opened it up, and almost immediately didn't like it. Forget my dad reading it -- *I* can't read the page. It consists of miniscule lines of light gray text on a dark gray background, with red highlighted text that's even slightly more difficult to read. I can read 9 point fixed gray75 on black in my xterms, but this is simply not legible.
Since I'm using xorg at the moment, I kicked into 640x480 zoom mode (Ctrl-Alt-KP+), and while it's still more difficult to read than my xterms, I can at least understand it. It has the fake scrollbars without arrows that I don't like much, and when I opened the "2oo5" list, they became sluggish. The popup menu is slow and plays the interface sounds that I complained about (there's a reason that Apple and MS and GNOME and KDE don't default to playing sounds when you, say, bring up a menu). Clicking on the arrow portion of the popup menu pops up that menu -- which I would expect from my use of many windowing GUIs -- but clicking on the textual part does nothing (and since the textual area was a larger target, that is what I first tried clicking on). I guess I just don't see what this website does that a simple Slashdot-like page with description and links would have also done.
This site has the same distracting animated Flash advertisements that I dislike (which cause CPU spikes on my computer -- granted, you could complain that Firefox simply does a poor job of handling this and should run Flash in a low-priority thread). Initially, Flashblock prevented them from coming up, but I figured that I should get a similar experience to a typical user viewing the page. These ads do not have sound, though, so they aren't as bad as the worst that I've seen. I don't actually know who the ad is for -- a strange logo appears on the left, two arrows move for a while, and then this huge brown blob comes flying straight at me. Then the ad cycles.
I guess that maybe the websites linked to were where I was supposed to go and be impressed, but when I clicked on them, nothing happened. When I middle-clicked (hoping that I'd get them in a new tab) nothing happened. When I right-clicked a link and chose "open in new window" nothing happened. Granted, I *do* have Flashblock installed, and maybe it could be some sort of interaction between the two -- but given how frusteratingly awful enabling either of the above two options is almost all the time (even if these websites are *really* good), I'm not willing to enable them.
There's a star with an "fs" in the upper left-hand-corner. It wiggles when I move my mouse over it, but clicking on it doesn't seem to do anything. There's what appears to be a little button in the top left hand corner of each section reading "fs", but clicking on it doesn't seem to do anything either.
I'm also going to comment on the design. I'm not a designer, so I am speaking outside my area of expertise (and it's easy to claim that this is intended to be artsy and experimental or simply subjective). However, this page does not fit with the majority of page layout rules that I'm familiar with. There a
Slashdot Mirror
Google's cache is basically a large-scale financial transfer from the copyrightholders (who serve to benefit from the ads they serve and other interaction they get from end-users visitng their site) to google, who benefits directly by keeping people longer on google's site and thus, basically, shucks them more ads.
Uh, no.
I use regular links (which don't have highlighting and the Google thingie that the top) unless the regular link isn't available. So *if* the ads are available, I'm hitting them anyway. Well, actually I'm not, because my browser filters them out, but whatever.
Plus, anyone can set up a cache. There's nothing special about Google versus, say, you, except that Google is helping me out by providing me with archived, otherwise unavailable data and you aren't.
Uh, no. The clause that was relevant was an *exemption*. I.e. the DMCA's regular restrictions that would have made Google liable *don't* apply here.
All this means is that someone didn't manage to abuse the DMCA in a particular instance. While this is nice, it's hardly amazing.
or he'll simply keep it to himself and no-one will benefit under any circumstances.
Yup. And yet, somehow, there is far more content on the Internet than I could ever see in a lifetime of browsing. Sorry, but no sympathy here.\
That's a discussion for another time, perhaps, but just consider how many crimes, from the somewhat irritating to the seriously damaging, are possible only because of the effective anonymity the Internet provides. Again, that's not to say that some don't benefit, but IMHO most of the benefits are illusory, while the damage from spam, viruses, phishing and on-line fraud, and countless other things is very real.
That's a straw man argument. None of these are directly facilitated by Google Cache.
1. The cache removes content control away from the author. For example, a site like EzineArticles.com prevents scraping by using an IP blocking method based on the speed at which pages are spidered by that IP. It is absurdly easy to circumvent this by simply spidering the Google cache of that article instead of spidering the site. Google's IP blocking is far less restrictive, and combined with the powerful search tool, it allows for easy, anonymous contextual scraping of sites whose Terms of Service explicitly refuse it.
Yup. EzineArticles.com is abusing HTTP. It's not supposed to do that (and I could think of many valid systems, like prefetching, that could potentially trigger this). There are some correct systems that will break with their scheme. That's their fault.
I don't care *what* someone's ToS says. If you need a ToS, then you can't allow anonymous access. Simple as that. The benefit to the Web of caching being allowed vastly outweighs the benefit to the Web of everyone having their own halfassed ToS schemes. Anything else vastly reduces the ability of a computer to deal with the Web in an automated fashion -- computers can't read legalese.
2. The cache extends access to removed content, often for months if not years at a time. Google rarely replaces 404 pages (perhaps it is because of their wish to have the largest number of indexed pages). I have clients who have nearly 48,000 non existent pages still cached in google that have not been present in over 14 months. Despite using 404s, 301s, etc. these pages have not yet been removed. Furthermore, Google's often mishandling of robots.txt, nocache, and nofollow leaves webmasters dependent upon search traffic hesitant to force removal of these pages using the supposedly standardized methods of removal.
I've yet to hear of problems with Google's handling of these, and Google *does* provide a link to the current page. Why should Google take down 404 pages? I *hate* getting 404s. It drives me up a wall. But sometimes, when I get one, I can go back to the Wayback Engine or Google Cache and actually see the page.
3. The cache allows Google to serve site content anonymously. Don't want the owner of a site to know you are looking at their goods (think of companies grepping for competitor IPs), just watch the cache instead.
A) I don't sympathize with people who expect to be able to glean information from monitoring everyone reading content.
B) There are a thousand ways to do this that don't involve Google. This argument is already lost.
Now, a web author must know how to manipulate HTML meta tags and/or a robots.txt file.
Such is the price of progress. If he doesn't like that, he can have a tool that does it.
Fair use is for users, for people, not multi-billion dollar companies.
Right. Me. The end user. The person browsing.
Can you guys spot the trend too?
You mean *other* than that the movies in this list made by Disney are almost all retellings of public-domain stories (yes, public domain -- that awful fate of stories that Disney tries to help Congress save their own content from)? Well, aside from the one that they just outright stole, of course.
That film is great, and completely blows away most of their other recent films for sheer style, verve and originality --- I reckon it's better than The Lion King, which suffered rather from the Disney over-earnestness.
It's not very hard to improve on The Lion King for originality.
The sad thing is that it's "okay" for Disney to swipe someone's work to make hundreds of millions of dollars.
But if you swipe a copy of a Disney movie...well, then Disney needs every ounce of legislative support it can *get* from Congress to squash you. After all, you're preventing *creative artists from getting their dues*.
Eisner not only saved Disney financially, but built it into the huge, powerful media corporation it is today.
You know, I'm not saying that Eisner might not have had some important ideas or insights, but the idea that any CEO does something like this is absurd. Yes, business rags like to make statements like this, to glorify high-level execs, but the idea that the thousands of people who *aren't* the CEO were just sitting around directionless when the new CEO walked in and personally made everything better is absurd. There were business development people out closing new deals, animators producing better products...the whole mass of people. What's more, it's a pretty safe bet that the CEO you just slapped in, who doesn't have the years of experience with the company and industry that other people already there do, isn't going to be likely to singlehandedly do much.
I'm not saying that the CEO doesn't do anything, but he's one administrator in a very large pool.
What the CEO *is* good for is PR value. Bad couple of years in a publically-owned company and the shareholders are getting cranky? Kick out the CEO, take an artificially inflated "one-time restructuring charge" that you separate when talking about your profits ("Hey, it was just a one-time thing, you know?"), do some creative accounting to funnel that overstated loss into "profit" the next couple quarters (which keeps the shareholders off your back for a while while you try some other things and hope that the market improves), declare that the CEO is a brilliant success who has solved the company's problems, and then hang onto him until the next time that you need a scapegoat. He knows the risks of the job and goes with a golden parachute (without which he wouldn't have put himself in the position of sacrificial lamb). Repeat as needed.
It never occured to me that all those fairy tales they turned into movies were public domain. I always wondered who they paid to get the legal rights to all that material. Obviously, no one. Mouse ear wearing bastards.
Oh, it's much, much worse than that.
When Disney swipes content to make masses of money, it's just fine.
If you swipe Disney's content, it's a social-fabric-threatening disaster.
Yes, but said choice has some pretty wonky proposals (item II.2 on their party platform):
Taxation
All persons are entitled to keep the fruits of their labor. We oppose all government activity that consists of the forcible collection of money or goods from individuals in violation of their individual rights.
You want to try running a country with no funding? Good luck.
II.6 on said platform:
Monopolies
Government is the source of monopoly, through its grants of legal privilege to special interests in the economy. We advocate a strict separation of business and State.
Oh, nonsense. Goverment might be able to produce monpolies, but if the Libertarian Party simply disbelieves that natural monopolies exist, I can't wait for *their* enlightening explanation. Hell, a lot of the time the state grants monopolies, it's because it's a situation where you have a natural monopoly *already* and we'd rather have a regulated monopoly than an unregulated one. Power distribution is going to be a monopoly, because *nobody* is going to run a second set of lines to your house, and lines are owned in per-line increments. Given that you have a monopoly, you can at least regulate it to keep it from doing some of the nasty things it can do.
Just because free markets are a powerful tool doesn't mean that they are the answer to every problem in a system.
I like some things that libertarians push -- voting reform for one, because the current scheme seems to achieve stability with two parties, which I don't think is good. I like the idea of less military aggression -- I think that most of the time, if you have a lot of pissed off people who have finally come to blows, sending lots of other people in with guns and killing off some more people generally isn't a very effective long-term solution. I wish that a lot of America was a lot more socially liberal too, because I think that they'd be a lot happier.
But, ultimately, a hell of a lot of libertarianism seems to come down to one of a couple points:
1) Someone's discovered that free markets are a really cool tool, and decides that maximally applying them everywhere is the best possible way to make society function better.
2) Someone notices that most of the things that the federal government does are unconsitutional, and decides that the best way to resolve the mentally-irritating difference is to drastically cut back the powers of the federal government.
3) Someone gets fed up over corruption or some other difficult-to-solve problem, can't come up with a convincing fix, and decides that the best way to solve the problem is just to erase the current political structures (D & R) and start over, hoping that this time, the social ill will just not appear.
Now, granted, I'm sure that people have latched onto D or R for reasons that I'd find just as uncompelling...
1. Your brain uncritically accepts the first information it gets in any new subject area as correct, whether it is or not.
2. Subsequent information that is in keeping with the information already present in your brain is uncritically accepted as correct, whether it is or not.
3. A new item that is contradictory to the information present in your brain is automatically rejected as incorrect, whether it is or not.
4. Your brain considers every item that is compatible with the majority of its information in a given subject area to be correct and every item that is contradictory to its information to be incorrect. As a result, the brain has no internal way to know which items of its information are correct representations of the real world and which are not.
I'd say that 1-4 can be condensed and put much more accurately as the following: knowledge is accepted based on how well it fits with other knowledge.
Take a kid, take him to church and keep shoveling him full of stories about invisible beings who hate gays and how he should be responsible and give money to his church, and at every point from then on, he has to manage to build up enough conflicting information to completely overturn his previous worldview. Tell him that he needs to study the Bible and attend church regularly to guarantee continuous input supporting the view you are trying to impart, and you have a very stable system established. Tell him how he should teach *his* kids the same thing, and you get to utilize the trust that children learn to have in their parents when they learn that their parents know more than they do early on.
Scientology and Jim Jones' cult both used the technique of isolating a victim and trying to bombard them with messages supporting their claims.
5 Your brain has no way to know whether or not it has all the information required to respond appropriately to a given stimulus.
6 Unless your brain has additional information to the contrary, it interprets similar items as being identical.
7 Your brain cannot measure anything directly. All measurements must be made by comparison against an appropriate standard, which is often done incorrectly.
8 Your brain continues to interpret the external world as it was when the last sensory signal about a given subject area was received. As a result, the brain is not aware that some of its formerly correct information is now incorrect.
I dunno about the value of 5-8. 5 seems obvious, 6 overly-strong (the mind does fuzzy matching...is that what this is trying to say?), and 7 and 8 not very useful -- yes, if you have no information that would lead you to know X, then you probably aren't going to know X.
I've personally found it in information search experiments: people will focus on what confirms what they want to see rather than what is there; it often leads to disappointment and resentment.
I think that it's more that people will believe what fits better with what they already believe.
Some Christians, for example, might have a visceral reaction to the presentation of logical or scientific errors in the Bible; but at the same time, a non-believer would have a similar response to a believer's unshakable claim to a real spiritual presence in his or her life. In both cases the believer and non-believer are faced with information that threatens their ideas of the constitution of reality. But they're more than ideas. These beliefs are part of the fabric of each person's world -- they are the frame for experiencing and understanding space and time. Threats to faith (in God's existence or his absence) threaten one's sense of well-being.
I don't think that this comparison is the same.
The existence of God (for the fraction of a percent of people who are really thinking about the question) is entirely a metaphysical question.
The fact that people don't like challenges to their way of thinking is an artifact of the way we evaluate truth -- we compare new statements to what we already know, and see how well they explain what we've seen.
If you indoctrinate someone in something for years and then feed them a new fact that conflicts with what they've learned, their brain is going to recoil (unless that new fact suddenly fits with their existing set of knowledge better than the entire set of nonsense that they've been fed up until this point). That new fact is going to be judged the conflicting item.
(Blinks) I may be out of touch here. What's wrong with the CSPANs?
Interesting site in your .sig, but I think that it would be better run on something like the bash.org codebase than Slashcode.
I dunno. I'd say that the first real social thing I looked up was "grunge", and found that WP's article and discussion was much more useful than anything else out there. I've almost never had good overview-level packets of information on social phenomena.
I've read an awful lot of European history on Wikipedia, and have been impressed with it.
I've read through the US Presidential biographies, starting with Washington. I liked reading them.
I've found that the information on US states, counties, and cities to be excellent.
Actually, if you take WP as a whole, I'd say that it's very good. It will always have warts of one sort or another, but it's better than anything else out there.
I don't understand why people like Futurama so much. I've tried over and over to get into it. My friends love it. It just isn't funny, though. I laugh at Family Guy, and I like (well, liked back in the day...haven't watched it for a very long time) the Simpsons, but I just don't see the appeal of Futurama.
For example, I remember one episode where the characters were on a planet with robots, and the robots were trying to build a building. They dropped a new chunk of building in, and it completed a "tetris line" and part of the building disappeared. My friends thought that it was uproariously funny, but I just didn't understand where the humor came from.
The show never really became enough of a drama for me to empathize with the characters (maybe if the episodes were longer...I don't know), and there just wasn't much humor that I could see.
A good chunk of the show seemed to be simply having the characters act out stereotypes -- the spineless sidekick, the ditzy teen, the bitter jerk, and so forth -- and given how many of the lines were spent on reinforcing those stereotypes, I would imagine that some people had to find the fact that Fry was such a klutz funny...but it just never tickled my sense of humor.
I'll grant that graphically, the show was impressive -- the cel-shaded 3D rendering and the much-beloved Groening style. I just couldn't understand why people liked the writing.
Sounds suspiciously like Space Ghost and that insect thingie.
I'll bet that it's really cheap to make, though.
Absolutely. You two said it. I *loved* Family Guy at first, and that is the single worst thing that happened to the series.
The other thing that got old was jokes involving Peter where the humor was supposed to derive from how long the joke was. An example would be Peter saying something to someone ("I'll bet you like hamburger"), then waiting for maybe five seconds and blinking while looking at that person. Then he'd say something to them with a sly grin ("C'mon, I'll bet you really like it"), then he'd go back to standing there. Repeat about four or five more times. I thought that one great thing about Family Guy was how quickly the humor kept coming -- you'd just be getting one joke when the scene would change, and other would be thrown in, and this was a deviation from that.
A couple years ago, CMU tried scanning for students with CIFS servers with simple passwords containing potentially-copyrighted files. I was somewhat perturbed by this.
The question is where exactly this ends.
Similarly, I was going to mention that, if/when credit completely replaces money it will probably be safer to use, hygienically. That's pretty much irrelevant now, but I'm still saying it because I feel that it's important.
In Oregon and New Jersey, self service gas pumps are illegal. I've always wondered whether that helps reduce disease vectors -- I mean, people fueling up are possibly travelling on the roadway from a long ways away. I'd imagine that gas pump handles are pretty darn unsanitary.
http://www.easternstorm.net/, as linked to in your URL, has an animated splash screen followed by what seems to be a broken page -- when I roll my mouse over chunks of the flash in the "WHEN" box, I get strange boxes appearing over the text and leaving chunks of the text overwritten. The "skip intro" button works, but nothing else seems to (like the "Continue" button) (though I'll grant that given the previous website posted as a response, probably something is just misconfigured on my machine, though I didn't have trouble with homestarrunner). The text in the "Cover" and "Site" sections is not selectable -- and this is a site where I might want to copy event information.
If there's drag-and-drop or some feature which Flash is crucial to implement, I'm not sure what it is.
I gave the two linked-to websites a look -- hey, I'll grant that at least theoretically, Flash could be useful. It's just that my experience with it in the real world has been pretty universally negative.
I tried this ferryhalim place, and saw a penguin game. I like Tux, so I decided to try that one. I think that the point of it is to put the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen and click as fast as you can. I mean, I'll grant that I *have* played minigames in commercial videogames that simply measured how quickly you could smack a button, so I can't claim that this sort of thing has never been done, but it just doesn't come off as that impressive or fun to me.
I'm willing to grant that maybe some of the games there are better than others, but there's a huge grid of games -- I don't want to dig through all of them.
As for the fcukstar.com place -- I opened it up, and almost immediately didn't like it. Forget my dad reading it -- *I* can't read the page. It consists of miniscule lines of light gray text on a dark gray background, with red highlighted text that's even slightly more difficult to read. I can read 9 point fixed gray75 on black in my xterms, but this is simply not legible.
Since I'm using xorg at the moment, I kicked into 640x480 zoom mode (Ctrl-Alt-KP+), and while it's still more difficult to read than my xterms, I can at least understand it. It has the fake scrollbars without arrows that I don't like much, and when I opened the "2oo5" list, they became sluggish. The popup menu is slow and plays the interface sounds that I complained about (there's a reason that Apple and MS and GNOME and KDE don't default to playing sounds when you, say, bring up a menu). Clicking on the arrow portion of the popup menu pops up that menu -- which I would expect from my use of many windowing GUIs -- but clicking on the textual part does nothing (and since the textual area was a larger target, that is what I first tried clicking on). I guess I just don't see what this website does that a simple Slashdot-like page with description and links would have also done.
This site has the same distracting animated Flash advertisements that I dislike (which cause CPU spikes on my computer -- granted, you could complain that Firefox simply does a poor job of handling this and should run Flash in a low-priority thread). Initially, Flashblock prevented them from coming up, but I figured that I should get a similar experience to a typical user viewing the page. These ads do not have sound, though, so they aren't as bad as the worst that I've seen. I don't actually know who the ad is for -- a strange logo appears on the left, two arrows move for a while, and then this huge brown blob comes flying straight at me. Then the ad cycles.
I guess that maybe the websites linked to were where I was supposed to go and be impressed, but when I clicked on them, nothing happened. When I middle-clicked (hoping that I'd get them in a new tab) nothing happened. When I right-clicked a link and chose "open in new window" nothing happened. Granted, I *do* have Flashblock installed, and maybe it could be some sort of interaction between the two -- but given how frusteratingly awful enabling either of the above two options is almost all the time (even if these websites are *really* good), I'm not willing to enable them.
There's a star with an "fs" in the upper left-hand-corner. It wiggles when I move my mouse over it, but clicking on it doesn't seem to do anything. There's what appears to be a little button in the top left hand corner of each section reading "fs", but clicking on it doesn't seem to do anything either.
I'm also going to comment on the design. I'm not a designer, so I am speaking outside my area of expertise (and it's easy to claim that this is intended to be artsy and experimental or simply subjective). However, this page does not fit with the majority of page layout rules that I'm familiar with. There a
Oh, but libertarians are perfectly open-minded and don't simply hold to an ideological mantra at all. ;-)
I am sure the cards are great and all, but us Linux users would never know due to the drivers.
I have a Radeon 9250 -- one of the last solidly-supported-with-an-open-source-driver cards out there. Definitely getting long in the tooth, though.