Not sure Fox News qualifies as a press outlet. Granted, they do a lot of press release-type articles, but I always thought that fell under marketing.
To be serious, there are ways of limiting the control that large mediia corporations have over everyday people. It's more reasonable and very possible to have a blanket ban for corporations from engaging in a particular action than to ban any particular corporation from a specific or generic set of behaviors.
You're actually committing a logical fallacy here. The statement actually boils down to the concept:
If not like -> not do.
What you're saying is:
If like -> do.
Most objections to the Golden Rule tend to be logically fallacious. It's understandable though. Even Wikipedia lists among the "variations" of the Golden Rule logically inconsistent statements. The majority of the objections tend to attack those "variations," which are subject to attacks because they are logically inconsistent.
The corruption of the Golden Rule is sometimes done in ignorance or error, but there is occasionally an intent to distort it for an ulterior, typically more sinister purpose. For example, another common extrapolation from the Golden Rule is the idea of "an eye for an eye."
There are a few objections that are more widely received as valid, particularly at the fringe cases. For example, the idea of killing the aggressor in self-defense is often brought up as an exception to the rule. As people are rarely suicidal, they probably wouldn't want to be killed, even in self defense (perceived or actual has no bearing here) by the other party. Hence by the Golden Rule, killing even if in self defense remains immoral.
Empiricism itself is a philosophical concept. There's a school of thought named after it.
And while people think it's a simple thing, it's actually rather complex. Most philosophers agree that you can't discover Truth. Where they disagree upon is the degree of certainty in which an idea no longer needs questioning and becomes accepted as factual. Heck, the very idea that it can be done at all is subject to debate.
I find it funny that people here can whip out the old "correlation != causation" argument at any mention of a study's conclusion, but don't actually understand that this actually comes from the philosophical idea that empirical proof != necessarily true.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Ergo, people only have the unalienable right to make up to $75,000 a year. Any more and it has to come from legislation.
I've known some who go on sugar packet raids at bodegas and Starbucks as a way to save money.
How incredibly snooty. Next, you'll be telling me they shop for groceries at Whole Foods. Now loading up on the sugar packets and whatever else on the counter from McDonalds--that's the lifestyle of the impoverished.
Most college kids, especially NYU and to a lesser extent Columbia kids, are actually living off their parents--about as far from impoverished as you can possibly be.
Correct. In many major metro areas, GP's $35K would be barely enough to survive in a small apartment in a run-down neighborhood far from the desirable areas. New York, DC, LA, San Fran, all come to mind. That level of income wouldn't qualify for food stamps or most other government subsudies either, so you're pretty much on your own.
It's absolutely not a happy existence. Most people I know who make $35K from one job also work a second job on nights and weekends. $75K is better, but even that's middle-of-the-road. To be actually happy living in those high cost of living areas, you'd probably need something closer to six figures, unless the company has benefits that mitigate the area's high cost of living.
The two formats really are for different things. The digital version is easier and faster to use. It's superior in the short run. The print version is hardier, able to remain useful under any situation. It's superior in the long run.
There are a lot of advantages to a digital version that print simply can't give you--that is, if they take advantage of the benefits of digital.
The largest advantage is search. The ability to search not only by the headword, but also within different parts of the entry like the definition is a huge win for the digital version. And the ability to filter using broad categories, e.g. transitive verbs, pronouns, words that were once proper names, australian slang, etc. would also be incredibly handy.
Portability is another, but one that I think will never be fully realized. Having a self-contained DVD or flash drive that can run without installation on any device it's in would be the ideal, but there would be DRM and binary nightmares.
Dynamic content is yet another advantage, but one that's a bit more difficult to do. Dynamic content could be anything from using a user's current browse history and/or search history to recommend words all the way to creating word trees containing words that have the same root or are related in some other way to the current entry.
Unfortunately, I don't think the digital interface (their online and CD-ROM versions are the same last I checked) of 2.0 is particularly easy to use. But it certainly has the potential to be so much more useful than the print version.
That having been said, I'd rather a hard copy myself (it would be nice if the hard copy came with a digital copy too, but I'm sure splitting them up makes far more business sense). I rather like the motion of flipping through pages to get to where I'm going. Occasionally, I'll find something interesting by glancing through unrelated entries looking for the word I want. And if nothing else, I like knowing that in 100 years, my descendants would still be able to use it, even if it will be a little dated by then.
That's quite an informative post about the S/PDIF protocol. But I suspect the cable quality debate harkens from a period where the signal sent to speakers and between devices was analog. In which case, signal degredation and interference was in fact an issue.
But at this point, manufacturing processes are so solid that even coat hangers sound as good as any "high fidelity" speaker cables. Which is to say that the real worth of any speaker cable irrespective of marketing and street price is probably only slightly more than its worth in copper.
It's pretty simple. Unless you're distributing some kind of information that they don't want you to (copyrighted material, classified information, trade secrets, etc.), you have to eventually come out of your shell and put to action those plans you and your conspirators have been working so hard to perfect while keeping secret.
It's then pretty easy to nab you right as you're putting those plans into action, or as you're about to put the final piece into its place.
But any mastermind coordinating some kind of nefarious plan over the internet deserves to be nabbed.
By "fine states" I'm guessing you mean the Australia, the UK, and the US. They haven't quite gotten to the level of China, North Korea, Myamar, Saudi Arabia, etc. But they're tripping over themselves trying to get there.
Re:Other than books, what is an iPad for?
on
7-Inch iPad Rumored
·
· Score: 1
Have no fear. Android tablets are right around the corner.
You know he's an idiot when he's using "loss-less" compression on his bytes and then calling that lines of code. Even the most basic physics student will tell you that the units of measurment are different.
That 25 million bytes is more closely analogous to the actual code zipped up, assuming the rest is accurate. Which it is not, but that's a separate argument.
But the fact stands that he can't even get his units correct. The rest of his points are thus equally suspect, and likely equally wrong.
Then just move it up the necessary levels of abstraction. Your circuits have to represent the atomic level. Software then emulates everything else from there.
I think the most pressing issue currently is that each neuron is in effect its own processor. So taking the paradigm from above, you'd need a machine capable of parallel running of 100-400 billion virtual processors. At a minimum, that's a 100-400 billion processor/core system.
I don't think it's achievable in 100 years, much less 10. We can get close to what the brain is capable of, but a true brain-like system will always be slower and less efficient than the actual brain itself. We can, however, simulate parts of the brain's abilities to the point where it's indistinguishable from a human. But the simulation would not be able to function beyond its intended design.
The key wasn't just searches though. They monetized in a way that was completely different.
Banner ads used to be the norm. They took forever to load (on a 56k modem which only ran at 53.3k anyway), popped up and got in the way, were everywhere, and didn't provide any value, but everybody accepted them as a fact of life.
Then Google came along, and suddenly, they weren't 500K pictures, but a few characters of text! And they usually sat there unassumingly, not trying to usurp your attention. And they were relevant too! When you searched for Tom Clancy's newest book you got ads that took you to where you could buy it!
Their genius was not just in providing decent search results (they weren't always the best at first--they were pretty reliable on average, but Altavista and often Yahoo came up with more relevant results), but also in not being absolute dicks when trying to make money off the page view. And that's why most people switched to Google.
Media companies include publishing companies (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.), broadcasting companies (radio, TV, etc.), production companies (film, music, theater, etc.). Just because they may have news shows, or have publications that purportedly contains facts, does not automatically mean the company does nothing but journalism.
More likely, they failed to adapt. They kept collecting links and hand-ranking them.
On the other hand, Google did the link collecting automatically, and came up with some formulas to automatically rank them as well. They still ranked some sites by hand afterwards, but it wasn't nearly as involved.
Funny thing is, sites like Digg and Reddit are exactly like what Yahoo used to be, except they use their users to rank instead of an employee.
Well, it depends. According to Wikipedia, Mosaic was released in April '93, and Webcrawler went live in April '94. That means there's a full year in when GP's story can take place and still be factually correct.
Again according to Wikipedia, Jerry Yang and David Filo started Yahoo in January '94, so yeah, I think GP's is correct when he said search engines didn't exist when Yahoo began.
Either way, search engines certainly didn't get popular until Altavista came around, and then later Google which truly revolutionized the web.
Slashdot Mirror
It certainly is from an engineering standpoint.
Not sure Fox News qualifies as a press outlet. Granted, they do a lot of press release-type articles, but I always thought that fell under marketing.
To be serious, there are ways of limiting the control that large mediia corporations have over everyday people. It's more reasonable and very possible to have a blanket ban for corporations from engaging in a particular action than to ban any particular corporation from a specific or generic set of behaviors.
How cool is that?
"I'm from Fucking, Austria bro!"
"Welcome to Fucking, Austria! Have a nice Fucking day!"
You're actually committing a logical fallacy here. The statement actually boils down to the concept:
If not like -> not do.
What you're saying is:
If like -> do.
Most objections to the Golden Rule tend to be logically fallacious. It's understandable though. Even Wikipedia lists among the "variations" of the Golden Rule logically inconsistent statements. The majority of the objections tend to attack those "variations," which are subject to attacks because they are logically inconsistent.
The corruption of the Golden Rule is sometimes done in ignorance or error, but there is occasionally an intent to distort it for an ulterior, typically more sinister purpose. For example, another common extrapolation from the Golden Rule is the idea of "an eye for an eye."
There are a few objections that are more widely received as valid, particularly at the fringe cases. For example, the idea of killing the aggressor in self-defense is often brought up as an exception to the rule. As people are rarely suicidal, they probably wouldn't want to be killed, even in self defense (perceived or actual has no bearing here) by the other party. Hence by the Golden Rule, killing even if in self defense remains immoral.
Empiricism itself is a philosophical concept. There's a school of thought named after it.
And while people think it's a simple thing, it's actually rather complex. Most philosophers agree that you can't discover Truth. Where they disagree upon is the degree of certainty in which an idea no longer needs questioning and becomes accepted as factual. Heck, the very idea that it can be done at all is subject to debate.
I find it funny that people here can whip out the old "correlation != causation" argument at any mention of a study's conclusion, but don't actually understand that this actually comes from the philosophical idea that empirical proof != necessarily true.
Nah: maverick.
A ritual sacrifice helps. The larger the better, in fact. A chicken isn't nearly as effective as a goat.
According to the Declaration:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Ergo, people only have the unalienable right to make up to $75,000 a year. Any more and it has to come from legislation.
I've known some who go on sugar packet raids at bodegas and Starbucks as a way to save money.
How incredibly snooty. Next, you'll be telling me they shop for groceries at Whole Foods. Now loading up on the sugar packets and whatever else on the counter from McDonalds--that's the lifestyle of the impoverished.
Most college kids, especially NYU and to a lesser extent Columbia kids, are actually living off their parents--about as far from impoverished as you can possibly be.
Correct. In many major metro areas, GP's $35K would be barely enough to survive in a small apartment in a run-down neighborhood far from the desirable areas. New York, DC, LA, San Fran, all come to mind. That level of income wouldn't qualify for food stamps or most other government subsudies either, so you're pretty much on your own.
It's absolutely not a happy existence. Most people I know who make $35K from one job also work a second job on nights and weekends. $75K is better, but even that's middle-of-the-road. To be actually happy living in those high cost of living areas, you'd probably need something closer to six figures, unless the company has benefits that mitigate the area's high cost of living.
The two formats really are for different things. The digital version is easier and faster to use. It's superior in the short run. The print version is hardier, able to remain useful under any situation. It's superior in the long run.
There are a lot of advantages to a digital version that print simply can't give you--that is, if they take advantage of the benefits of digital.
The largest advantage is search. The ability to search not only by the headword, but also within different parts of the entry like the definition is a huge win for the digital version. And the ability to filter using broad categories, e.g. transitive verbs, pronouns, words that were once proper names, australian slang, etc. would also be incredibly handy.
Portability is another, but one that I think will never be fully realized. Having a self-contained DVD or flash drive that can run without installation on any device it's in would be the ideal, but there would be DRM and binary nightmares.
Dynamic content is yet another advantage, but one that's a bit more difficult to do. Dynamic content could be anything from using a user's current browse history and/or search history to recommend words all the way to creating word trees containing words that have the same root or are related in some other way to the current entry.
Unfortunately, I don't think the digital interface (their online and CD-ROM versions are the same last I checked) of 2.0 is particularly easy to use. But it certainly has the potential to be so much more useful than the print version.
That having been said, I'd rather a hard copy myself (it would be nice if the hard copy came with a digital copy too, but I'm sure splitting them up makes far more business sense). I rather like the motion of flipping through pages to get to where I'm going. Occasionally, I'll find something interesting by glancing through unrelated entries looking for the word I want. And if nothing else, I like knowing that in 100 years, my descendants would still be able to use it, even if it will be a little dated by then.
In some places, you can get a restraining order if you demonstrate the person or a group of individuals is causing you sufficient grief.
The benefits of open source, community-driven OS's:
You don't need to supply your own libraries; you just need to submit your code changes back to the main project.
That's quite an informative post about the S/PDIF protocol. But I suspect the cable quality debate harkens from a period where the signal sent to speakers and between devices was analog. In which case, signal degredation and interference was in fact an issue.
But at this point, manufacturing processes are so solid that even coat hangers sound as good as any "high fidelity" speaker cables. Which is to say that the real worth of any speaker cable irrespective of marketing and street price is probably only slightly more than its worth in copper.
It's pretty simple. Unless you're distributing some kind of information that they don't want you to (copyrighted material, classified information, trade secrets, etc.), you have to eventually come out of your shell and put to action those plans you and your conspirators have been working so hard to perfect while keeping secret.
It's then pretty easy to nab you right as you're putting those plans into action, or as you're about to put the final piece into its place.
But any mastermind coordinating some kind of nefarious plan over the internet deserves to be nabbed.
By "fine states" I'm guessing you mean the Australia, the UK, and the US. They haven't quite gotten to the level of China, North Korea, Myamar, Saudi Arabia, etc. But they're tripping over themselves trying to get there.
Have no fear. Android tablets are right around the corner.
You know he's an idiot when he's using "loss-less" compression on his bytes and then calling that lines of code. Even the most basic physics student will tell you that the units of measurment are different.
That 25 million bytes is more closely analogous to the actual code zipped up, assuming the rest is accurate. Which it is not, but that's a separate argument.
But the fact stands that he can't even get his units correct. The rest of his points are thus equally suspect, and likely equally wrong.
Then just move it up the necessary levels of abstraction. Your circuits have to represent the atomic level. Software then emulates everything else from there.
I think the most pressing issue currently is that each neuron is in effect its own processor. So taking the paradigm from above, you'd need a machine capable of parallel running of 100-400 billion virtual processors. At a minimum, that's a 100-400 billion processor/core system.
I don't think it's achievable in 100 years, much less 10. We can get close to what the brain is capable of, but a true brain-like system will always be slower and less efficient than the actual brain itself. We can, however, simulate parts of the brain's abilities to the point where it's indistinguishable from a human. But the simulation would not be able to function beyond its intended design.
The key wasn't just searches though. They monetized in a way that was completely different.
Banner ads used to be the norm. They took forever to load (on a 56k modem which only ran at 53.3k anyway), popped up and got in the way, were everywhere, and didn't provide any value, but everybody accepted them as a fact of life.
Then Google came along, and suddenly, they weren't 500K pictures, but a few characters of text! And they usually sat there unassumingly, not trying to usurp your attention. And they were relevant too! When you searched for Tom Clancy's newest book you got ads that took you to where you could buy it!
Their genius was not just in providing decent search results (they weren't always the best at first--they were pretty reliable on average, but Altavista and often Yahoo came up with more relevant results), but also in not being absolute dicks when trying to make money off the page view. And that's why most people switched to Google.
Media companies != journalists.
Media companies include publishing companies (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.), broadcasting companies (radio, TV, etc.), production companies (film, music, theater, etc.). Just because they may have news shows, or have publications that purportedly contains facts, does not automatically mean the company does nothing but journalism.
More likely, they failed to adapt. They kept collecting links and hand-ranking them.
On the other hand, Google did the link collecting automatically, and came up with some formulas to automatically rank them as well. They still ranked some sites by hand afterwards, but it wasn't nearly as involved.
Funny thing is, sites like Digg and Reddit are exactly like what Yahoo used to be, except they use their users to rank instead of an employee.
Well, it depends. According to Wikipedia, Mosaic was released in April '93, and Webcrawler went live in April '94. That means there's a full year in when GP's story can take place and still be factually correct.
Again according to Wikipedia, Jerry Yang and David Filo started Yahoo in January '94, so yeah, I think GP's is correct when he said search engines didn't exist when Yahoo began.
Either way, search engines certainly didn't get popular until Altavista came around, and then later Google which truly revolutionized the web.
Fixed that for ya.
Sounds like a job for a good Minesweeper.