Assuming that you could repair it back to regular state, would we still consider it dead to begin with at that point? Death implies a kind of terminal state from which one cannot return.
A lot of cells in a dead body can function fine or be revived and repaired and continue to function fine, or we wouldn't have organ transplants. Unfortunately the brain passes the point or repair relatively quickly. We even have the term brain dead to refer to those kinds of edge cases.
But if we did develop the ability to reanimate a corpse within some amount of time, we'd stop referring to fresh corpses as dead people, since they aren't quite beyond repair yet.
The issue is that Twitter is trying to exist in the space somewhere between private publication and public forum, mainly for their own convenience. If you're a public space instead of a pub, you still don't owe anyone a megaphone or soapbox, but you can't throw them out if they've brought there own just because you don't like the message. A pub might remove people for any reason it cares to or establish some kind of dress code if it likes. However, it's going to draw scrutiny if only black people were being tossed out for dress code violations while whites, Asians, Latinos, etc. weren't being similarly kicked out for inappropriate attire.
Twitter could just stop trying to police their content all together and leave that up to the actual police and court system. Even if you're in a public place like a park, you can still be arrested for inappropriate conduct. Similarly, civil courts won't cease dealing with defamation or libel cases just because someone posted their statements on Twitter as opposed to in a newspaper. People tend to think that letting everyone have a voice is going to result in the spread of dangerous ideas or some such nonsense. How much attention do you give to the crazy person in the park spouting off lunacy about UFOs?
You'll be able to get encyclopedic details on Mount Fuji as you fly past, track your spouse's flight from your seat and zoom in for details on points of interest like the top 10 rides at Disneyland compiled from social media.
No I won't, because I won't use the map if it ceases to do the one thing I care about it doing well. Quit trying to make everything "better" with stupid shit no one asked for and ruining the experience with the added cruft and bullshit.
For some, there's a sense of adventure built in: You may never visit the Faeroe Islands, but you feel like you've been there when your flight draws a line over them.
Who the hell writes something like that with a straight face? Are we still doing sacrifices to the volcano gods?
Percentiles by themselves don't tell the whole story, especially if you're dealing with something that has a lopsided distribution, and you can also improve even if you do no better simply because someone else has now done worse. However, I do believe that some progress is being made here.
Also, if the jump were much larger, it suggests an almost too good to be true situation. There was a case some years ago in Atlanta where test scores in some of the worst districts started shooting up in what seemed like a miracle. Turned out that several teachers and administrators were cheating and altering tests in order to bump up the standardized test scores.
If nothing else it's good to see that a sports star realize that being a pro athlete is not a path to success for most students and to invest in something that's going to improve more people's lives in a meaningful way, even if it doesn't catapult them to multi-millionaire status.
The school system and its idiocy are what's responsible for a lot of teacher burnout. Dealing with that ugly machine is enough to suck the life and joy out of anyone.
I think Twitter is just another form of whatever the Jerry Springer Show was (is?) in that it's a dumpster fire that draws people in like moths to its dumpster fire flame. Only Twitter lets you be act like part of the live studio audience and join in dumpster fire from anywhere on the planet.
You're asking people to step away from that and expecting that they'll be able to do so?
Better to constantly rotate existing IDs than to randomly generate new ones. If you reuse existing ones and change them randomly, it pollutes data sets in ways that are harder for the companies that maintain them to detect. People are creatures of habit, so it likely wouldn't take very long to tie a pattern of behavior to an existing profile with a high degree of certainty.
At the end of the day if the user has full control over their device (which they don't with Apple), there isn't anything that advertisers can attempt to do that the user can't thwart in some way. Add in a VPN or some other service that obfuscates your IP / location and there's not a lot that they can do.
The helmet sounds interesting, but the testing apparatus (image from the study) in the linked study is really damned cool. I wish we could get something like that at the office, because it looks like it could one hell of an inverted choke-slam to those in need of such.
I generally agree with your assessment, and my problem isn't people willingly turning over information to these companies. I don't use Facebook and I've been moving away from Google (which is getting easier given how much less useful their search has become over the years), but the problem is that these companies are able to collect a large amount of personal information about me even when I don't use them and give them my business.
The only real problem I have with your argument is that the same could be said about free speech. There are quite a few people who think it shouldn't even exist and that the government should in fact clamp down on certain types of speech. I don't think that some people believing that a fundamental right shouldn't exist or be protected weakens the government's duty to uphold that right.
Someone certainly could have been paid as a part of that. If you assume that Starz did this for marketing purposes, there's no reason that they can't grease a few palms for far less money than it would take to run a full ad campaign. There are plenty of other examples of companies trying to clamp down on stuff in an idiotic (and ultimately pointless) way that tend to get lampooned, so it's not hard to imagine that intentionally engaging in that kind of buffoonery would elicit a similar, and organic response. If it's failing to achieve the desired effect, you can always pay for coverage.
I have no evidence that Starz has done anything beyond acting the in the typical and foolhardy manner that large media companies tend towards, but having heard nothing of any of these properties, I can't help but wonder if someone has determined that you can get a lot of free publicity through something like this. It's especially effective because it gets around ad blocking.
I wonder if this was a "leak" or if this was done intentionally as marketing. Up until this moment I wasn't aware that the show existed. Advertising costs a good amount of money, but why pay for that when you can just leak a little bit of content and then run around screaming about it in the exact kind of way that is guaranteed to draw attention to yourself?
Can the Streisand Effect be harnessed to achieve greater awareness?
To your first point, I would say that Google has been deceitful. I'm sure they've informed you of exactly what they do with the information collected through their services which you and others provide voluntarily. They've broken no laws so there's little the government can do. There's also the cynical take that governments don't mind companies amassing these large caches of data, so long as they let the government peek at it. It's like having a secret police that you don't need to maintain for yourself.
The second point is what we already have. The sad reality is that a large segment of the population places a very low value on their privacy, and there are other segments that actively wish to erode privacy rights as long as it harms some other group which they detest.
All I can say is that hopefully the next generation of founding fathers learn from the mistakes of history and enshrine better protections into their constitution and seek to build a nation that's willing to stand up for and defend those rights.
Google is a little duplicitous in its dealings. Its real customers, the advertisers know exactly what they're getting and what the terms are, but the people having their data sucked up aren't always told what's happening and are often quite horrified when they find out what companies like Google, Facebook, etc. have collected about them.
I don't particularly trust either group. I think the best approach is to enshrine certain guarantees of privacy into the constitution or law and let the men with gavels smack them around for non-compliance.
I looked over it and there were some brands on there that I wasn't aware of Pepsi owning (mostly a few of the snack food brands) but I also realized that there isn't a product on that list that a person couldn't get from someone else or just do without entirely. In fact, you'd probably be better off if you never bought products from almost all of those brands to begin with for health reasons.
Not just that, but that trying to wage a war on drugs is a pointless exercise that only causes more harm than it could hope to accomplish good. Illegal drug users aren't going to seek help, but addicts who don't have to worry about going to jail just might. Never mind the stupidity of putting people in jail for something that causes no harm to anyone but themselves if it even does that. Most of the ill health effects come directly from the low-grade drugs cut with all manner of things that make them more harmful than the drug itself and the inflated prices of a black market lead to additional crime committed in order to feed those addictions.
We've tried doing it this way for how many times now and when did it ever work? Now there's just a vacuum for someone else to step in and even more profit incentive to do so which just ensures that it will happen.
If we've learned anything from all of the major drug kingpins that have been taken down over the years, it's that putting them in jail will stop the drug trade. Anyone taking bets on how long it takes for someone to start calling themselves Dread Pirate Roberts 3 assuming it hasn't happened already?
Were you referring to the case of some software that was being used by judges to determine sentencing based on likelihood of recidivism? I do recall that particular case using data like parents' arrest record, along with a lot of other questions that had a higher likelihood of occurring in individuals from poorer communities, which has a strong racial correlation in many places.
Assuming the algorithm is appropriately designed, it should only matter if whether or not your parents being incarcerated is a good predictor of recidivism. If it isn't, the data would show that a bunch of black people who were arrested had children who didn't commit crimes, and that there were several black parents who were never arrested that did have children who committed crimes. I understand that someone could easily look at the data wrong and make terrible conclusions (see the gender pay gap as one common example) based on bad reasoning, but that's another matter if we're assuming that the algorithm was properly designed.
I think you'd have a stronger claim with the argument that arresting parents over trivial matters or non-violent crimes eroded the family structure in many African American communities which resulted in an increase in criminality. Studies that have explored this to that level of details support such reasoning. It isn't that black people commit more crime because they are black, it's that poor people from single-parent families commit more crime, and there happen to be a disproportionate number of black people that fall into that group. It's not the only factor, but we'd significantly reduce the problem by decriminalizing drugs.
Are we okay with filtering people based on those preferences though?
For a dating site, yes absolutely. You wouldn't make the same argument against allowing people to filter based on sex would you? Wouldn't bothering to list sex as an attribute on a person's profile just reinforce standard of conventional attractiveness too?
Making a dating site that's less useful at helping people find attractive (physical or in a broader sense) partners just means that people will go to a different site. If you don't like it, go make a pure personality dating site. I have a feeling it will just end up randomly matching short men with fat women, but neither should have any grounds for complaint.
You'd probably want to break it down by age. Younger people are generally going to skew liberal in almost any population and regardless of where the population as a whole lies along the political spectrum. That's just the tendency of the next generation. The technology websites (which are most heavily used by the younger demographics) are going to skew that way as well, and create a bit of a snowball effect as other people are attracted to those places that have similar users.
There's nothing stopping conservative minded individuals from creating their own online platforms, and some have done just that.
Personally I'd like a separate app that can sync to devices, cloud, etc. that's independent of the apps that manage, play, or download the content. My biggest gripe with iTunes is that since they started their cloud music service, it's completely fucked everything up as far as device/content management goes. Maybe they thought they were trying to make it simple so that anyone could use it, but the reality is that they turned it into a mess that makes it almost impossible to get it to do what you actually want it to do.
What really kills software (and to a similar extend software companies) is that it gets too big and grows beyond what made it great to begin with and tries to glom all kinds of shit no one really wants onto that core product. Those inane and unwanted add-ons metastasize and ruin everything.
When not just call the standalone app iTunes and remove the other stuff? iTunes is still pretty recognizable as far as branding goes, so I don't see them throwing it away.
It has been long overdue for this though. Too much cruft over the years has left it a bloated mess. Hopefully the put some sane developers in charge of these apps who just want a clean, efficient app instead of the usual baboons that would fuck with the UI in the most bizarre manner possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming that you could repair it back to regular state, would we still consider it dead to begin with at that point? Death implies a kind of terminal state from which one cannot return.
A lot of cells in a dead body can function fine or be revived and repaired and continue to function fine, or we wouldn't have organ transplants. Unfortunately the brain passes the point or repair relatively quickly. We even have the term brain dead to refer to those kinds of edge cases.
But if we did develop the ability to reanimate a corpse within some amount of time, we'd stop referring to fresh corpses as dead people, since they aren't quite beyond repair yet.
The issue is that Twitter is trying to exist in the space somewhere between private publication and public forum, mainly for their own convenience. If you're a public space instead of a pub, you still don't owe anyone a megaphone or soapbox, but you can't throw them out if they've brought there own just because you don't like the message. A pub might remove people for any reason it cares to or establish some kind of dress code if it likes. However, it's going to draw scrutiny if only black people were being tossed out for dress code violations while whites, Asians, Latinos, etc. weren't being similarly kicked out for inappropriate attire.
Twitter could just stop trying to police their content all together and leave that up to the actual police and court system. Even if you're in a public place like a park, you can still be arrested for inappropriate conduct. Similarly, civil courts won't cease dealing with defamation or libel cases just because someone posted their statements on Twitter as opposed to in a newspaper. People tend to think that letting everyone have a voice is going to result in the spread of dangerous ideas or some such nonsense. How much attention do you give to the crazy person in the park spouting off lunacy about UFOs?
You'll be able to get encyclopedic details on Mount Fuji as you fly past, track your spouse's flight from your seat and zoom in for details on points of interest like the top 10 rides at Disneyland compiled from social media.
No I won't, because I won't use the map if it ceases to do the one thing I care about it doing well. Quit trying to make everything "better" with stupid shit no one asked for and ruining the experience with the added cruft and bullshit.
For some, there's a sense of adventure built in: You may never visit the Faeroe Islands, but you feel like you've been there when your flight draws a line over them.
Who the hell writes something like that with a straight face? Are we still doing sacrifices to the volcano gods?
Percentiles by themselves don't tell the whole story, especially if you're dealing with something that has a lopsided distribution, and you can also improve even if you do no better simply because someone else has now done worse. However, I do believe that some progress is being made here.
Also, if the jump were much larger, it suggests an almost too good to be true situation. There was a case some years ago in Atlanta where test scores in some of the worst districts started shooting up in what seemed like a miracle. Turned out that several teachers and administrators were cheating and altering tests in order to bump up the standardized test scores.
If nothing else it's good to see that a sports star realize that being a pro athlete is not a path to success for most students and to invest in something that's going to improve more people's lives in a meaningful way, even if it doesn't catapult them to multi-millionaire status.
The school system and its idiocy are what's responsible for a lot of teacher burnout. Dealing with that ugly machine is enough to suck the life and joy out of anyone.
All companies are greedy. If a company is trying to tell you that they aren't, they're liars as well as greedy.
I think Twitter is just another form of whatever the Jerry Springer Show was (is?) in that it's a dumpster fire that draws people in like moths to its dumpster fire flame. Only Twitter lets you be act like part of the live studio audience and join in dumpster fire from anywhere on the planet.
You're asking people to step away from that and expecting that they'll be able to do so?
Better to constantly rotate existing IDs than to randomly generate new ones. If you reuse existing ones and change them randomly, it pollutes data sets in ways that are harder for the companies that maintain them to detect. People are creatures of habit, so it likely wouldn't take very long to tie a pattern of behavior to an existing profile with a high degree of certainty.
At the end of the day if the user has full control over their device (which they don't with Apple), there isn't anything that advertisers can attempt to do that the user can't thwart in some way. Add in a VPN or some other service that obfuscates your IP / location and there's not a lot that they can do.
The helmet sounds interesting, but the testing apparatus (image from the study) in the linked study is really damned cool. I wish we could get something like that at the office, because it looks like it could one hell of an inverted choke-slam to those in need of such.
I generally agree with your assessment, and my problem isn't people willingly turning over information to these companies. I don't use Facebook and I've been moving away from Google (which is getting easier given how much less useful their search has become over the years), but the problem is that these companies are able to collect a large amount of personal information about me even when I don't use them and give them my business.
The only real problem I have with your argument is that the same could be said about free speech. There are quite a few people who think it shouldn't even exist and that the government should in fact clamp down on certain types of speech. I don't think that some people believing that a fundamental right shouldn't exist or be protected weakens the government's duty to uphold that right.
Someone certainly could have been paid as a part of that. If you assume that Starz did this for marketing purposes, there's no reason that they can't grease a few palms for far less money than it would take to run a full ad campaign. There are plenty of other examples of companies trying to clamp down on stuff in an idiotic (and ultimately pointless) way that tend to get lampooned, so it's not hard to imagine that intentionally engaging in that kind of buffoonery would elicit a similar, and organic response. If it's failing to achieve the desired effect, you can always pay for coverage.
I have no evidence that Starz has done anything beyond acting the in the typical and foolhardy manner that large media companies tend towards, but having heard nothing of any of these properties, I can't help but wonder if someone has determined that you can get a lot of free publicity through something like this. It's especially effective because it gets around ad blocking.
I wonder if this was a "leak" or if this was done intentionally as marketing. Up until this moment I wasn't aware that the show existed. Advertising costs a good amount of money, but why pay for that when you can just leak a little bit of content and then run around screaming about it in the exact kind of way that is guaranteed to draw attention to yourself?
Can the Streisand Effect be harnessed to achieve greater awareness?
To your first point, I would say that Google has been deceitful. I'm sure they've informed you of exactly what they do with the information collected through their services which you and others provide voluntarily. They've broken no laws so there's little the government can do. There's also the cynical take that governments don't mind companies amassing these large caches of data, so long as they let the government peek at it. It's like having a secret police that you don't need to maintain for yourself.
The second point is what we already have. The sad reality is that a large segment of the population places a very low value on their privacy, and there are other segments that actively wish to erode privacy rights as long as it harms some other group which they detest.
All I can say is that hopefully the next generation of founding fathers learn from the mistakes of history and enshrine better protections into their constitution and seek to build a nation that's willing to stand up for and defend those rights.
Google is a little duplicitous in its dealings. Its real customers, the advertisers know exactly what they're getting and what the terms are, but the people having their data sucked up aren't always told what's happening and are often quite horrified when they find out what companies like Google, Facebook, etc. have collected about them.
I don't particularly trust either group. I think the best approach is to enshrine certain guarantees of privacy into the constitution or law and let the men with gavels smack them around for non-compliance.
I looked over it and there were some brands on there that I wasn't aware of Pepsi owning (mostly a few of the snack food brands) but I also realized that there isn't a product on that list that a person couldn't get from someone else or just do without entirely. In fact, you'd probably be better off if you never bought products from almost all of those brands to begin with for health reasons.
Are there any real people on social media these days? Seems mostly to be a lot of simulacra marketing something at you.
Here's a much better article involving lab mice. Here's another good one.
Not just that, but that trying to wage a war on drugs is a pointless exercise that only causes more harm than it could hope to accomplish good. Illegal drug users aren't going to seek help, but addicts who don't have to worry about going to jail just might. Never mind the stupidity of putting people in jail for something that causes no harm to anyone but themselves if it even does that. Most of the ill health effects come directly from the low-grade drugs cut with all manner of things that make them more harmful than the drug itself and the inflated prices of a black market lead to additional crime committed in order to feed those addictions.
We've tried doing it this way for how many times now and when did it ever work? Now there's just a vacuum for someone else to step in and even more profit incentive to do so which just ensures that it will happen.
If we've learned anything from all of the major drug kingpins that have been taken down over the years, it's that putting them in jail will stop the drug trade. Anyone taking bets on how long it takes for someone to start calling themselves Dread Pirate Roberts 3 assuming it hasn't happened already?
So why is it okay to record and filter based on gender, but not height?
Were you referring to the case of some software that was being used by judges to determine sentencing based on likelihood of recidivism? I do recall that particular case using data like parents' arrest record, along with a lot of other questions that had a higher likelihood of occurring in individuals from poorer communities, which has a strong racial correlation in many places.
Assuming the algorithm is appropriately designed, it should only matter if whether or not your parents being incarcerated is a good predictor of recidivism. If it isn't, the data would show that a bunch of black people who were arrested had children who didn't commit crimes, and that there were several black parents who were never arrested that did have children who committed crimes. I understand that someone could easily look at the data wrong and make terrible conclusions (see the gender pay gap as one common example) based on bad reasoning, but that's another matter if we're assuming that the algorithm was properly designed.
I think you'd have a stronger claim with the argument that arresting parents over trivial matters or non-violent crimes eroded the family structure in many African American communities which resulted in an increase in criminality. Studies that have explored this to that level of details support such reasoning. It isn't that black people commit more crime because they are black, it's that poor people from single-parent families commit more crime, and there happen to be a disproportionate number of black people that fall into that group. It's not the only factor, but we'd significantly reduce the problem by decriminalizing drugs.
Are we okay with filtering people based on those preferences though?
For a dating site, yes absolutely. You wouldn't make the same argument against allowing people to filter based on sex would you? Wouldn't bothering to list sex as an attribute on a person's profile just reinforce standard of conventional attractiveness too?
Making a dating site that's less useful at helping people find attractive (physical or in a broader sense) partners just means that people will go to a different site. If you don't like it, go make a pure personality dating site. I have a feeling it will just end up randomly matching short men with fat women, but neither should have any grounds for complaint.
You'd probably want to break it down by age. Younger people are generally going to skew liberal in almost any population and regardless of where the population as a whole lies along the political spectrum. That's just the tendency of the next generation. The technology websites (which are most heavily used by the younger demographics) are going to skew that way as well, and create a bit of a snowball effect as other people are attracted to those places that have similar users.
There's nothing stopping conservative minded individuals from creating their own online platforms, and some have done just that.
Personally I'd like a separate app that can sync to devices, cloud, etc. that's independent of the apps that manage, play, or download the content. My biggest gripe with iTunes is that since they started their cloud music service, it's completely fucked everything up as far as device/content management goes. Maybe they thought they were trying to make it simple so that anyone could use it, but the reality is that they turned it into a mess that makes it almost impossible to get it to do what you actually want it to do.
What really kills software (and to a similar extend software companies) is that it gets too big and grows beyond what made it great to begin with and tries to glom all kinds of shit no one really wants onto that core product. Those inane and unwanted add-ons metastasize and ruin everything.
When not just call the standalone app iTunes and remove the other stuff? iTunes is still pretty recognizable as far as branding goes, so I don't see them throwing it away.
It has been long overdue for this though. Too much cruft over the years has left it a bloated mess. Hopefully the put some sane developers in charge of these apps who just want a clean, efficient app instead of the usual baboons that would fuck with the UI in the most bizarre manner possible.