Your, quite frankly, appalling metric mistake notwithstanding (my iPhone is not 6cm thick!!!), living in Japan as I do, allow me to offer some insight:
Phones here are frickin' thick, bulky, and godawful to carry. This is one of the main reasons I was so excited for the iPhone. I can carry it in my pocket and I don't have a giant brick bulging out of my ass. I can sit down comfortably with it in my pocket.
There is a rather-unfounded belief in the geekworld that Japan is technologically advanced, and that this is best evidenced by their cellphones. No and no. It consistently lags far behind the rest of the world--and I am including the rest of Asia in that. Korea, for example, is still a dirty, smelly hellhole, but when you go there, you think, "oh, okay; computers, regular cellphones, web technologies--just like 'home.'" China, even though it is technically still a developing country, looks an awful lot like the US, technologically. Here in Japan, however, they have cellphones that no one else does--and no one else wants, and many things that have been handled by computers for almost as long as I can remember growing up in the US, still require paper forms filled out by hand. I get carbon copies--like, actual carbon copies--for some documents at the post office, for example. Tech I haven't seen since I was in high school at the latest (I'm 35).
Cellphone manufacturers here like to pile on the unnecessary, extraneous garbage, and completely ignore usability. Furthermore, like the US, they are locked to a certain provider, and those providers have features disabled. When you go buy a cellphone, you usually can't even try one out first to see what the interface is like. The first time you operate it is after you've already filled out the contract and had the SIM chip installed. If you find out in that first 30 seconds that it is a complete kludge and that it only plays music that is encoded with special software that you have to buy from the provider for $40, as an example that I know all too well, tough. This is your phone for the next 2 years.
Looking around, I have seen the iPhone really taking off with college-aged people who already had iPods and understand that computers, not cellphones, are the center of any kind of modern life, but older people actually say "What? I have to have a computer to use a phone???" The iPhone boxes here are all emblazoned with a big sticker that says "Warning! You must have a computer to use this phone!" because so many people just plain didn't get the concept, and a lot of people don't even have computers.
No, my friend, this is not abnormal for a Japanese cellphone. In fact, it's the norm. And I can guarantee that it is a nightmare to use, and probably crashes and needs to be rebooted all the time, and completely dies after 2 years, just like every other Japanese cellphone I've had. These things are garbage.
The man is a complete hack, and frequently exaggerates his headlines and summaries to the point of actual deceit. He makes any rational discussion of the pressing need to revamp copyright a descent into stupid name-calling.
Now I wonder if I'm better off just installing Ubuntu on the MBP and the Netbook and spend a lot less money on the desktop and build myself one with Ubuntu as well.
So you like an OS and want to standardize on it, but now because of a totally forseeable bump, you're thinking of throwing away both OSes you use now and go with a brand new one...
No, I'll tell you what you're going to do: You're going to suck it up and just buy a MacBook Air and an iMac and stick to your plan. Or, at least, that's what I did, despite making the same noises as you're making here.
I, too, was banking on a Hackintosh netbook, but because of some problems with Dell, and the fact that I don't like the idea of suddenly not getting updates, and the Air coming WAY down in price, I just got an Air with everything maxed. It is hands-down the best laptop I've ever had. And despite all the whining I did about the lack of ports... Um, I haven't even noticed. I already used an external monitor and USB hub at work, and although I got the external network cable, I haven't actually ever used it. I don't even know if it works.
No, if you want to standardize on an OS, you should just do it, instead of cracking open a brand new can of worms in protest. I've got the whole house on OSX now, and everything is super smooth. Way smoother than it ever was on Windows, and I don't even want to think about what it'd be like on Ubuntu. It's hard enough to get that to work right on one machine, let alone a network of 4 including a TVputer. Ugh.
Thank you. I have been saying the same thing for years. When you're talking about things like public complacency, demagoguery, institutional racism, exclusivist ideology... Um, Nazi Germany is your go-to historical example.
I compare things to the Chinese communist and cultural revolutions too, but I usually have to give a quick little history lesson because Westerners' knowledge of Asian history is pretty fuzzy (I only know it because I studied it in college--don't ask me about Western history, though--I know nothing). Everyone, however, knows well about the Third Reich.
Interesting aside: Talking about Nazis here in Japan gets you nowhere. They don't know anything about it. I saw the most hilarious proof of that a few weeks ago at an Oktoberfest. There was a Japanese guy there--in his 30s, looked pretty normal--wearing a camo-print jacket emblazoned with a Nazi flag on the back. Yeah, guy... Um... You couldn't even own that in Germany. I have wondered if he made it through the day before a German lectured him.
I wouldn't say it's a myth. I'm not portly by any means (people think I'm thin--but most people are fat), but I've been steadily dropping weight (fat--I have a fat-checking scale) for a few weeks just by kind of tracking what makes it go up and down for me. I've found that if I eat like my wife (Japanese), i.e. tons of carbs (rice), I just keep putting on fat. I cut that rice and other carbs--the major source of my calories on the Japanese diet I have (she cooks for me, and she's great!) is from those carbs--and I see the number going down with absolutely no loss in energy or healthful feeling. That, and I stop eating the moment I feel full.
That being said, I think your idea on strength training might just send me back to the gym. I used to go, but I got sick of the amount of time it took. If I could cut the cardio, I'd be back down to a reasonable time frame. Also, I always enjoyed the strength training more anyway. It probably also explains the weird feeling of general well-being you get from a really painful body, which never made any sense to me.
The creation of those bits required the harming of a child, there's nothing crazy about wanting to outlaw those bits.
But here's where that starts to bug me: What about crime scene photography? Rotten.com? War photography? Possession of pictures of crimes and brutality are not outlawed in any case except this one. Also, no one really argues that Rotten.com should be outlawed because it will result in more crimes/suicides/whatever being committed. Why? Because they're just pictures. We don't know why people are looking at them, and in many cases probably don't want to know.
The other thing is that these bits are just that: bits. Endlessly copyable, ethereal, and fundamentally removed from the event they are cobbled together to represent. They do not hurt children. The bastards who put them in that order hurt children, and those people are the ones we need to spend our time and energy finding.
It comes down to a real-crime vs. thoughtcrime problem for me. I care a great deal about stopping people from hurting children. But I don't care if other people whack off to the idea of hurting children. I don't. It's their business. The furor over CP is not about hurting children, it's about hunting down people with unpopular fantasies and treating them as though they hurt children. It doesn't make any sense.
Furthermore, I think it's a "low-hanging fruit" cop-out by law enforcement. Finding CP producers is very hard detective work, and successes are few and far between. That has got to be frustrating and disheartening. However, if you can declare that anyone possessing endlessly and anonymously copyable images of child abuse as being virtually the same as the producer, that makes things a hell of a lot easier, just by increasing the sheer number of people you're looking for. It's the same, I feel, as the security theater we have at airports now. Finding terrorists is hard work, but any $6/hr idiot can pull a half-empty water bottle out of a backpack. Let's do that instead. People then feel like if they don't bend over and let their rights and freedoms be trampled, they are somehow in favor of child rape or blowing up airplanes. It's a witch hunt, plain and simple.
Finally, I want to point out that your point of moving abuse offshore is actually more correct than you meant. Yes, that very well might happen, which would put CP on the same economic model as anything else. We in the developed world enjoy coffee and chocolate and cane sugar as basic commodities. Those are produced by slave labor. We just don't see it, so it allows us to feel good about ourselves. Those aren't the only products, though. Everything has slave labor tucked away in it somewhere. Moving our unhealthy obsessions out of sight is totally normal, and there isn't a single person who isn't guilty of exploiting it in developed countries. I'm sorry to be callous, but to that point, I can only respond with "...so?"
Just because something is reprehensible doesn't mean it should be abolished. There are cost/benefit balances to examine, and I, along with many people who usually post anon about this, just think the cost is way too high to go after people with CP on their hard drives. It violates the rights of all of us, goes against the philosophies of free societies, dilutes law enforcement resources better spent on the producers, and probably won't have any effect anyway.
How is advocating the arrest of child rapists "sick?"
Re:Why complain about choice?
on
Lulu Introduces DRM
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I am very tired of people trying to write rules for life. There is no algorithm; there are no unassailable truths. Being totally consistent in all things does not actually make any sense, because there is no one right answer to be applied to all cases.
We like to think that a totally logically consistent pattern of behavior will yield better results, but it won't, for two basic reasons:
1) This idea is inherited from religious/magical thought and is, as far as I am concerned anyway, a crock of horseshit already, because it doesn't scale. You end up with fundamentalist Muslims killing people with rocks over petty shit, or evangelicals who believe that Jesus erases all their sins and that, therefore, even the most offensive crimes against humanity can be fixed with prayer and Kleenex.
2) This is actually part of the first reason, but these patterns don't exist in any objective way. They are applied after the fact by humans as shorthand. Religions made up simple rules to get people's minds off the big things so they could improve everyday life, and the cracks only start to really show when life is so good that we can take another look at those rules. Math doesn't exist. Numbers don't exist. Grammar doesn't exist (don't tell Chomsky). Ideas and meaning don't exist. They are all just tools to make our monkey lives better. We can't be frustrated when people's behavior is not logically consistent. It really shouldn't be.
So yes, you're right, it is logically inconsistent to call for the boycott of a company that uses slave labor, but not one which violates your geek religion's creed against DRM. But most people are smart enough to see that those things aren't even slightly similar, and only a crazy person would apply the same logic to both.
That being said, if you are living in the developed world (and if you're reading this, you probably are), guess what? Virtually every product you enjoy has slave labor tucked away in it somewhere. You can't live high on the hog without slavery. We've just gotten very good at hiding it so we can feel superior. There's always a slave. Always.
And that doesn't bother me. I don't like it, but I don't think it can be avoided, and to try to do so would make my life incredibly inconvenient.
I'm a pretty big liberal, too, but I can't fathom what this guy (the disabled guy or the summarizer) is thinking.
A video game is a luxury product. It isn't a necessity. If I'm making a product to sell, I'm making it to generate revenue. That's it. If I also happen to find it cool, that is a definite bonus, but it's primary purpose is to collect money from people to give to me. If I look at my market and think, "Hey, I bet I could make a bunch of money off of supporting disabled people," I'd do it. That's just good business.
However, if the product is a video game, the changes I'd need to make would be way more expensive than what I could expect to get out of blind people who want to play video games (which--and I'm just guessing here--is probably close enough to zero to just round down). There are a lot of blind people in the world, yes, but the subset of them who might want to play a video game is probably tiny. If market research found that this was not the case, I might change my mind on it, but in all likelihood, the only response I could give a blind person wanting to play my video game is, "have you considered whether this hobby is really for you?"
Now, if I'm making--I dunno--cars, then I can probably be sure that if I can make those accessible to disabled people (not blind people!), I can make some money. Although the market, unless I'm mistaken, has found it better to just have companies that specialize in conversions.
Liberal attitudes do not preclude a grasp of free-market capitalism, which really does provide the most, best products and services most of the time. Every once in awhile you find something that it can't handle, and that's when government has to tweak the rules to address that (which opens up new business opportunities--I'm sure the ADA has done wonders for the car-conversion companies). But luxury products like video games? Come on.
If Sony isn't meeting your gaming needs, vote with your wallet.
Academics drive Capitalism. High-level research is not done by corporations (anymore--there used to be places like HP that did, but Carly, being an ignorant capitalist, killed that off). Publicly-funded research is what hands ideas to the private sector. Sometimes academic research just breaks off and becomes private (Google).
The point of making products/ideas without competitive accountability is to explore the possibilities that lie beyond what pays out in the short term. The slow death of American academia is ultimately what is going to kill off the economy as well. It just takes time for the consequences to trickle into the private sector.
Nothing worthwhile, nothing, from the last century, was made by the private sector alone. Nothing. I don't care what technological innovation you think of; if we dig back through the history of that thing, we're going to find taxpayer-funded academic research.
I don't want to live in your ideal society, and I don't actually think you would like it, either. The last time we tried it your way, it was affectionately known as the Dark Ages. You may think you'd be a knight or a nobleman, but I think it's a lot more likely that you, me, and everyone we know, would be serfs.
Oops, you beat me to it. Now I feel silly for my much lighter post further down. Ditto on everything you said. "High significant" is one of my all-time favorite pet peeves, and I make any author I'm editing strip those adverbs out. It either is or is not. Don't give me this flowery bullshit.
Just want to point out that even though the correlation coefficients are definitely significant, that isn't effect size. Squaring the coefficients will give you a better idea of the size of the effect we're talking about here. In this case, the effect was found to account for about 11% to 27% of the shared variance. This is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but it also doesn't mean that you can really bet on it.
I'm not one of these "social science isn't science" trolltards. I just like to remind people to think in effect sizes to temper their enthusiasm. This is interesting stuff, no matter what, but having a couple quick 'n' dirty formulae for calculating effect size in your mental pocket will keep your reality check intact.
Microsoft continually shoots itself in the foot by completely changing the user interface with each new release of software, resulting in massive productivity losses as everyone has to relearn how to do their job.
This. This is why I ended up on the Mac the last time I was looking at a new laptop (sorry, Linux didn't meet my needs--as much as I wanted it to). I took one look at Vista and Office 2007 and was like, "oh good lord, why should I re-learn an interface???" I then looked at the Mac and found that, despite the fact that I hadn't used a Mac seriously in almost 10 years, I knew where everything was and how to do everything. Also, the MS Office interface still looked like something I knew how to use.
Sometimes I cannot figure that company out. I actually think that the Office 2007 interface, now that I've forced myself to use it every once in awhile (I'm teaching a class that is helped by knowing how to do things in it so I can explain), I think that, had I never used the product before, I'd take to it very quickly. That is probably what they were going for.
Except...
When you have a monopoly, I think you should probably think more about keeping your existing customers than getting new ones. People have to use MS Office; they aren't going to start because of your great new UI. All a change of that magnitude does is piss of your base. They should have at least offered an option to keep the 2003 interface, which was basically the same as the 2000 interface. Basically, MS can't even get any new customers. It sure as hell can lose them, though. Their constant UI changes make no sense given their place in the market.
OpenOffice, even though I don't like it, is easy to use. KDE and Gnome environments are easy to use. The Mac and its software is easy to use. Why would the industry leader in OSes and basic applications want to make their products more irritating than the (often cheaper) competitions'?
Of course, I'm a college prof, so I may be biased.
That being said, I'm a college prof outside of the US, because here they'll actually pay me a decent middle-class salary for my time and degrees, whereas in the US, I literally had a hard time paying rent. As in, my food and utilities budget was what was left after I paid rent; I had no discretionary income, and didn't even have a mobile phone.
HOWEVER, I'm not in the hard sciences, but I still agree that science and technology are the basis of all developed countries' growth. There's no room for linguists and psychometricians in anyone's budgets without physicists and chemists and biologists and engineers making things that make money.
Let's see, start with a hypothesis, design an experiment to test it, get surprising results, evaluate results and experiment, formulate a new hypothesis...
The whole thing is crazy. I live in Japan, which is considerably more socialized than the US and... Umm... It's nice. My life is still based on the free market; I can do whatever I want; I can even get really, really wealthy if I so choose/have the opportunity. But my taxes also pay for a lot of great services that come at a fraction of the cost they would if they had to compete.
The US could do all this stuff at the current tax levels, by just slashing the crap out of the military budget, and I'm not talking about body armor or anything we usually think of when we think of the military budget. There is so much pork in there (and yet we still sometimes can't provide our troops with what they need!) that if we cut it all out, we could do really great things for ourselves at the same price.
Taxes aren't bad unless they don't provide value for money. In sane countries, they do.
Adopt a kid and find out what the other side is like.
I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in raising someone else's kid. Like I said, I'm not really that bothered by not having kids. It's kind of a bummer, but I don't stay awake nights, unless it's to drink and play video games--things I couldn't--or, rather, wouldn't--do if I had a kid. The nursing home/ashes thing was a self-deprecating joke. If my grandparents' deaths are any indication, I'll be so senile by then that it won't matter if the person at my bedside is my own kin or the Grim Reaper himself. And who cares about my ashes?
Back to the original point, I heartily agree that I don't know what it's like. But I know that I don't know what it's like and therefore, when a lot of people with kids tell me what it's like, I'm inclined to assume that they know better than me, and adjust my expectations accordingly. I believe that most people are normal and capable of living their lives and aren't trying to get away with anything. There are exceptions, but they are extremely uncommon. Most people are good people (or, rather, no worse than me), so I trust them when they say it's a lot to take in.
That being said, and I'm going way OT here, I have friends who are still the people I knew before they had kids, and I have others who turned into the shitty adults we all hated when we were kids. What I have noticed, though, is that it's the former ones who still have us 'round for dinner, and the latter who sequester their kids away from the Childless People. It's also the former ones who have kids I don't mind sharing an evening with--because they know how to act like normal human beings--and it's the others whose kids are a terror--probably because their parents' smothering/protecting behavior is leading to severe social retardation.
I know, because it's not like we don't have any siblings with kids or friends with kids or were kids ourselves. We know nothing about kids, or parenting, or... what is it you call it? Family?
Please never, ever, ever say this. It is so unbelievably insulting. I actually can think of a couple childless people I know who seemed to be clueless about the lifestyle of coworkers with kids, but I can count them on one hand.
No, I don't know personally what it's like to be responsible for someone's physical and emotional well-being, but I've seen it done, and it looks pretty hard. I don't whine about coworkers with kids until it seems like they use it as a blanket excuse for why they can't do anything even when every other parent is fine with it. You know exactly what I'm talking about (unless you're the one who is always dropping the ball "because of the kids"). It's a mean trick to play on someone, to make them feel like they are directly harming the development of a little child by asking that someone pull their weight.
Then there's the other side. My wife and I can't have kids. That's okay with us; we've gotten over being depressed about it, and have just decided to be active with our families in other ways in the hopes that maybe a niece or nephew might visit us in the nursing home, or at least pick up our ashes. But try selling that to a boss if you don't have kids. People without kids still have families and still want to be connected to them, but unless those family members fell out of your own crotch, they don't really count. It's not like I'm saying "I can't make it to that meeting; my dad has the sniffles." But "Any way I can get out of that unscheduled meeting you threw right in the middle of my family reunion weekend?"
And I guess that's what I was doing. I kinda thought I was so great that I didn't need to worry about the consequences, and that is why I called our be-dreadlocked grandparent a child. There is a very small standard deviation on intelligence, I think, and even if you're pretty smart, you're far from alone in that. You won't be given any special treatment until you have really, really proven yourself or unless you are really, really smart. Refusing to submit to totally reasonable norms like business wear is arrogant and a symptom of much more serious attitudinal problems that most employers just plain don't want to take a chance with.
That being said, I think we, as profs, need to remember South Park's wisdom: "There is a time and a place for everything. And that's college." I can't be too hard on people for screwing up; this is the safe place we as a society have created precisely for screwing up.
The problem arises when you get out of college and still think it's okay to screw up.
Black, European-fit collared shirts, tight black non-jeans, kinda clunky black (shined--always shined) shoes with thick soles, short black carefully mussed hair, four small hoop earrings (2 in each ear). This was my work attire.
Not conflating anything. I wasn't showing up in bondage wear or anything.
Good luck moving up in your company, then (unless you're in design or something).
Looking the part is an important part of playing the part. I'm sorry, but it's true. The higher you go, the more likely it will be that you will need to represent the company at some time, and your appearance may not present an image that is good for the company.
Take your appearance, as you've described yourself here, for example. You would have to knock my socks on their asses before I bought anything from you. Why? Because I have a very negative reaction to dreadlocks. I think they're disgusting. And if you're not black, those are best not described as dreadlocks, but "matted, filthy, homeless hair." You might be the nicest guy in the world. I might want to hang out with you (you'd endure endless shit for the dreadlocks, though), but I don't want to have anything to do with your company because I don't know of any good companies that would let you out of the basement, let alone hire you. It reflects poorly on the company.
I don't want you to think I'm just coming down on you like "the Man," man. This is, in fact, all new to me. I'm 35 now, but I was a goth until I was about 29. I wasn't dirty (very few goths are); I dressed well (just all black), and I'm a pretty smart cookie. But it just seemed like I couldn't make anything happen. No one would hire me for anything worthwhile, despite my solid academic record and recommendations from previous employers. I blamed all sorts of things--the economy (okay, that had a hand in it), stupid HR people (is there any other kind?), the time I got diarrhea from eating the expired food in my fridge (all I had left) during the interview--but once the (tasteful--not tribal) earrings were removed, hair was returned to natural brown, and I threw some more colors into my wardrobe, things picked up almost immediately.
I'm not saying that appearance is really a good indication of your abilities. It isn't; we all know that. What I'm saying is that it's like proper spelling: We value it not for what it is, but what it implies: This person gives a shit. This person has gone through some of the same shaping experiences as I have, and which I have found to be important in my own life.
So, to be honest, as a former adherent to the "looks don't matter, man; it's all about self-expression, man" school of thought, I'm probably more likely to write you off as a petulant child, because I sure as hell was one myself when I thought I was too good to put on a pair of slacks and a dress shirt.
No one likes wearing business wear. You're not special because you want to look like a freak. Everyone wants that. But they don't so as to create a more coherent social community with tribal markings that facilitate a feeling of belonging and fraternity. It's not about the suppression of savage customs; it's about being polite to one another and making people feel at ease.
It would be no different if the business community standardized on strap-on dildos and horse-tail butt-plugs. We'd still wear them to create a community. (Un?)Fortunately, business attire has not taken such a fashion direction, so it's slacks and collared shirts for all.
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Your, quite frankly, appalling metric mistake notwithstanding (my iPhone is not 6cm thick!!!), living in Japan as I do, allow me to offer some insight:
Phones here are frickin' thick, bulky, and godawful to carry. This is one of the main reasons I was so excited for the iPhone. I can carry it in my pocket and I don't have a giant brick bulging out of my ass. I can sit down comfortably with it in my pocket.
There is a rather-unfounded belief in the geekworld that Japan is technologically advanced, and that this is best evidenced by their cellphones. No and no. It consistently lags far behind the rest of the world--and I am including the rest of Asia in that. Korea, for example, is still a dirty, smelly hellhole, but when you go there, you think, "oh, okay; computers, regular cellphones, web technologies--just like 'home.'" China, even though it is technically still a developing country, looks an awful lot like the US, technologically. Here in Japan, however, they have cellphones that no one else does--and no one else wants, and many things that have been handled by computers for almost as long as I can remember growing up in the US, still require paper forms filled out by hand. I get carbon copies--like, actual carbon copies--for some documents at the post office, for example. Tech I haven't seen since I was in high school at the latest (I'm 35).
Cellphone manufacturers here like to pile on the unnecessary, extraneous garbage, and completely ignore usability. Furthermore, like the US, they are locked to a certain provider, and those providers have features disabled. When you go buy a cellphone, you usually can't even try one out first to see what the interface is like. The first time you operate it is after you've already filled out the contract and had the SIM chip installed. If you find out in that first 30 seconds that it is a complete kludge and that it only plays music that is encoded with special software that you have to buy from the provider for $40, as an example that I know all too well, tough. This is your phone for the next 2 years.
Looking around, I have seen the iPhone really taking off with college-aged people who already had iPods and understand that computers, not cellphones, are the center of any kind of modern life, but older people actually say "What? I have to have a computer to use a phone???" The iPhone boxes here are all emblazoned with a big sticker that says "Warning! You must have a computer to use this phone!" because so many people just plain didn't get the concept, and a lot of people don't even have computers.
No, my friend, this is not abnormal for a Japanese cellphone. In fact, it's the norm. And I can guarantee that it is a nightmare to use, and probably crashes and needs to be rebooted all the time, and completely dies after 2 years, just like every other Japanese cellphone I've had. These things are garbage.
The man is a complete hack, and frequently exaggerates his headlines and summaries to the point of actual deceit. He makes any rational discussion of the pressing need to revamp copyright a descent into stupid name-calling.
Can we please just all ignore him?
Now I wonder if I'm better off just installing Ubuntu on the MBP and the Netbook and spend a lot less money on the desktop and build myself one with Ubuntu as well.
So you like an OS and want to standardize on it, but now because of a totally forseeable bump, you're thinking of throwing away both OSes you use now and go with a brand new one...
No, I'll tell you what you're going to do: You're going to suck it up and just buy a MacBook Air and an iMac and stick to your plan. Or, at least, that's what I did, despite making the same noises as you're making here.
I, too, was banking on a Hackintosh netbook, but because of some problems with Dell, and the fact that I don't like the idea of suddenly not getting updates, and the Air coming WAY down in price, I just got an Air with everything maxed. It is hands-down the best laptop I've ever had. And despite all the whining I did about the lack of ports... Um, I haven't even noticed. I already used an external monitor and USB hub at work, and although I got the external network cable, I haven't actually ever used it. I don't even know if it works.
No, if you want to standardize on an OS, you should just do it, instead of cracking open a brand new can of worms in protest. I've got the whole house on OSX now, and everything is super smooth. Way smoother than it ever was on Windows, and I don't even want to think about what it'd be like on Ubuntu. It's hard enough to get that to work right on one machine, let alone a network of 4 including a TVputer. Ugh.
Don't be silly.
Thank you. I have been saying the same thing for years. When you're talking about things like public complacency, demagoguery, institutional racism, exclusivist ideology... Um, Nazi Germany is your go-to historical example.
I compare things to the Chinese communist and cultural revolutions too, but I usually have to give a quick little history lesson because Westerners' knowledge of Asian history is pretty fuzzy (I only know it because I studied it in college--don't ask me about Western history, though--I know nothing). Everyone, however, knows well about the Third Reich.
Interesting aside: Talking about Nazis here in Japan gets you nowhere. They don't know anything about it. I saw the most hilarious proof of that a few weeks ago at an Oktoberfest. There was a Japanese guy there--in his 30s, looked pretty normal--wearing a camo-print jacket emblazoned with a Nazi flag on the back. Yeah, guy... Um... You couldn't even own that in Germany. I have wondered if he made it through the day before a German lectured him.
I wouldn't say it's a myth. I'm not portly by any means (people think I'm thin--but most people are fat), but I've been steadily dropping weight (fat--I have a fat-checking scale) for a few weeks just by kind of tracking what makes it go up and down for me. I've found that if I eat like my wife (Japanese), i.e. tons of carbs (rice), I just keep putting on fat. I cut that rice and other carbs--the major source of my calories on the Japanese diet I have (she cooks for me, and she's great!) is from those carbs--and I see the number going down with absolutely no loss in energy or healthful feeling. That, and I stop eating the moment I feel full.
That being said, I think your idea on strength training might just send me back to the gym. I used to go, but I got sick of the amount of time it took. If I could cut the cardio, I'd be back down to a reasonable time frame. Also, I always enjoyed the strength training more anyway. It probably also explains the weird feeling of general well-being you get from a really painful body, which never made any sense to me.
The creation of those bits required the harming of a child, there's nothing crazy about wanting to outlaw those bits.
But here's where that starts to bug me: What about crime scene photography? Rotten.com? War photography? Possession of pictures of crimes and brutality are not outlawed in any case except this one. Also, no one really argues that Rotten.com should be outlawed because it will result in more crimes/suicides/whatever being committed. Why? Because they're just pictures. We don't know why people are looking at them, and in many cases probably don't want to know.
The other thing is that these bits are just that: bits. Endlessly copyable, ethereal, and fundamentally removed from the event they are cobbled together to represent. They do not hurt children. The bastards who put them in that order hurt children, and those people are the ones we need to spend our time and energy finding.
It comes down to a real-crime vs. thoughtcrime problem for me. I care a great deal about stopping people from hurting children. But I don't care if other people whack off to the idea of hurting children. I don't. It's their business. The furor over CP is not about hurting children, it's about hunting down people with unpopular fantasies and treating them as though they hurt children. It doesn't make any sense.
Furthermore, I think it's a "low-hanging fruit" cop-out by law enforcement. Finding CP producers is very hard detective work, and successes are few and far between. That has got to be frustrating and disheartening. However, if you can declare that anyone possessing endlessly and anonymously copyable images of child abuse as being virtually the same as the producer, that makes things a hell of a lot easier, just by increasing the sheer number of people you're looking for. It's the same, I feel, as the security theater we have at airports now. Finding terrorists is hard work, but any $6/hr idiot can pull a half-empty water bottle out of a backpack. Let's do that instead. People then feel like if they don't bend over and let their rights and freedoms be trampled, they are somehow in favor of child rape or blowing up airplanes. It's a witch hunt, plain and simple.
Finally, I want to point out that your point of moving abuse offshore is actually more correct than you meant. Yes, that very well might happen, which would put CP on the same economic model as anything else. We in the developed world enjoy coffee and chocolate and cane sugar as basic commodities. Those are produced by slave labor. We just don't see it, so it allows us to feel good about ourselves. Those aren't the only products, though. Everything has slave labor tucked away in it somewhere. Moving our unhealthy obsessions out of sight is totally normal, and there isn't a single person who isn't guilty of exploiting it in developed countries. I'm sorry to be callous, but to that point, I can only respond with "...so?"
Just because something is reprehensible doesn't mean it should be abolished. There are cost/benefit balances to examine, and I, along with many people who usually post anon about this, just think the cost is way too high to go after people with CP on their hard drives. It violates the rights of all of us, goes against the philosophies of free societies, dilutes law enforcement resources better spent on the producers, and probably won't have any effect anyway.
How is advocating the arrest of child rapists "sick?"
I am very tired of people trying to write rules for life. There is no algorithm; there are no unassailable truths. Being totally consistent in all things does not actually make any sense, because there is no one right answer to be applied to all cases.
We like to think that a totally logically consistent pattern of behavior will yield better results, but it won't, for two basic reasons:
1) This idea is inherited from religious/magical thought and is, as far as I am concerned anyway, a crock of horseshit already, because it doesn't scale. You end up with fundamentalist Muslims killing people with rocks over petty shit, or evangelicals who believe that Jesus erases all their sins and that, therefore, even the most offensive crimes against humanity can be fixed with prayer and Kleenex.
2) This is actually part of the first reason, but these patterns don't exist in any objective way. They are applied after the fact by humans as shorthand. Religions made up simple rules to get people's minds off the big things so they could improve everyday life, and the cracks only start to really show when life is so good that we can take another look at those rules. Math doesn't exist. Numbers don't exist. Grammar doesn't exist (don't tell Chomsky). Ideas and meaning don't exist. They are all just tools to make our monkey lives better. We can't be frustrated when people's behavior is not logically consistent. It really shouldn't be.
So yes, you're right, it is logically inconsistent to call for the boycott of a company that uses slave labor, but not one which violates your geek religion's creed against DRM. But most people are smart enough to see that those things aren't even slightly similar, and only a crazy person would apply the same logic to both.
That being said, if you are living in the developed world (and if you're reading this, you probably are), guess what? Virtually every product you enjoy has slave labor tucked away in it somewhere. You can't live high on the hog without slavery. We've just gotten very good at hiding it so we can feel superior. There's always a slave. Always.
And that doesn't bother me. I don't like it, but I don't think it can be avoided, and to try to do so would make my life incredibly inconvenient.
Maybe there's logical consistency after all.
I'm a pretty big liberal, too, but I can't fathom what this guy (the disabled guy or the summarizer) is thinking.
A video game is a luxury product. It isn't a necessity. If I'm making a product to sell, I'm making it to generate revenue. That's it. If I also happen to find it cool, that is a definite bonus, but it's primary purpose is to collect money from people to give to me. If I look at my market and think, "Hey, I bet I could make a bunch of money off of supporting disabled people," I'd do it. That's just good business.
However, if the product is a video game, the changes I'd need to make would be way more expensive than what I could expect to get out of blind people who want to play video games (which--and I'm just guessing here--is probably close enough to zero to just round down). There are a lot of blind people in the world, yes, but the subset of them who might want to play a video game is probably tiny. If market research found that this was not the case, I might change my mind on it, but in all likelihood, the only response I could give a blind person wanting to play my video game is, "have you considered whether this hobby is really for you?"
Now, if I'm making--I dunno--cars, then I can probably be sure that if I can make those accessible to disabled people (not blind people!), I can make some money. Although the market, unless I'm mistaken, has found it better to just have companies that specialize in conversions.
Liberal attitudes do not preclude a grasp of free-market capitalism, which really does provide the most, best products and services most of the time. Every once in awhile you find something that it can't handle, and that's when government has to tweak the rules to address that (which opens up new business opportunities--I'm sure the ADA has done wonders for the car-conversion companies). But luxury products like video games? Come on.
If Sony isn't meeting your gaming needs, vote with your wallet.
Academics drive Capitalism. High-level research is not done by corporations (anymore--there used to be places like HP that did, but Carly, being an ignorant capitalist, killed that off). Publicly-funded research is what hands ideas to the private sector. Sometimes academic research just breaks off and becomes private (Google).
The point of making products/ideas without competitive accountability is to explore the possibilities that lie beyond what pays out in the short term. The slow death of American academia is ultimately what is going to kill off the economy as well. It just takes time for the consequences to trickle into the private sector.
Nothing worthwhile, nothing, from the last century, was made by the private sector alone. Nothing. I don't care what technological innovation you think of; if we dig back through the history of that thing, we're going to find taxpayer-funded academic research.
I don't want to live in your ideal society, and I don't actually think you would like it, either. The last time we tried it your way, it was affectionately known as the Dark Ages. You may think you'd be a knight or a nobleman, but I think it's a lot more likely that you, me, and everyone we know, would be serfs.
They love big unaccountable government.
And have the higher standard of living to prove it.
Whoah, that's the best analogy I've ever read. I'm retiring mine and using yours from here on out!
Oops, you beat me to it. Now I feel silly for my much lighter post further down. Ditto on everything you said. "High significant" is one of my all-time favorite pet peeves, and I make any author I'm editing strip those adverbs out. It either is or is not. Don't give me this flowery bullshit.
Nice post.
Just want to point out that even though the correlation coefficients are definitely significant, that isn't effect size. Squaring the coefficients will give you a better idea of the size of the effect we're talking about here. In this case, the effect was found to account for about 11% to 27% of the shared variance. This is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but it also doesn't mean that you can really bet on it.
I'm not one of these "social science isn't science" trolltards. I just like to remind people to think in effect sizes to temper their enthusiasm. This is interesting stuff, no matter what, but having a couple quick 'n' dirty formulae for calculating effect size in your mental pocket will keep your reality check intact.
ignorance != stupidity
Wow, what a refreshing remark to see on Slashdot.
A lot of the stuff we talk about here is pretty esoteric stuff. Most people don't even know it exists, and that is not their fault.
Microsoft continually shoots itself in the foot by completely changing the user interface with each new release of software, resulting in massive productivity losses as everyone has to relearn how to do their job.
This. This is why I ended up on the Mac the last time I was looking at a new laptop (sorry, Linux didn't meet my needs--as much as I wanted it to). I took one look at Vista and Office 2007 and was like, "oh good lord, why should I re-learn an interface???" I then looked at the Mac and found that, despite the fact that I hadn't used a Mac seriously in almost 10 years, I knew where everything was and how to do everything. Also, the MS Office interface still looked like something I knew how to use.
Sometimes I cannot figure that company out. I actually think that the Office 2007 interface, now that I've forced myself to use it every once in awhile (I'm teaching a class that is helped by knowing how to do things in it so I can explain), I think that, had I never used the product before, I'd take to it very quickly. That is probably what they were going for.
Except...
When you have a monopoly, I think you should probably think more about keeping your existing customers than getting new ones. People have to use MS Office; they aren't going to start because of your great new UI. All a change of that magnitude does is piss of your base. They should have at least offered an option to keep the 2003 interface, which was basically the same as the 2000 interface. Basically, MS can't even get any new customers. It sure as hell can lose them, though. Their constant UI changes make no sense given their place in the market.
OpenOffice, even though I don't like it, is easy to use. KDE and Gnome environments are easy to use. The Mac and its software is easy to use. Why would the industry leader in OSes and basic applications want to make their products more irritating than the (often cheaper) competitions'?
I just choked on my sandwich.
You're joking right? I've yet to find anything that works right on WINE.
On the Mac, I use Codeweavers' Crossover, but only because it was free awhile back. It, too, is buggy as hell, and is based on WINE.
Sorry, if you want to use Windows apps on Linux or the Mac, emulation is the way to go. It's not free, but it works perfectly.
Marry me!
Of course, I'm a college prof, so I may be biased.
That being said, I'm a college prof outside of the US, because here they'll actually pay me a decent middle-class salary for my time and degrees, whereas in the US, I literally had a hard time paying rent. As in, my food and utilities budget was what was left after I paid rent; I had no discretionary income, and didn't even have a mobile phone.
HOWEVER, I'm not in the hard sciences, but I still agree that science and technology are the basis of all developed countries' growth. There's no room for linguists and psychometricians in anyone's budgets without physicists and chemists and biologists and engineers making things that make money.
You call that science!?
Let's see, start with a hypothesis, design an experiment to test it, get surprising results, evaluate results and experiment, formulate a new hypothesis...
Yes, Einstein, that would indeed be science.
I could kiss you for that comment.
The whole thing is crazy. I live in Japan, which is considerably more socialized than the US and... Umm... It's nice. My life is still based on the free market; I can do whatever I want; I can even get really, really wealthy if I so choose/have the opportunity. But my taxes also pay for a lot of great services that come at a fraction of the cost they would if they had to compete.
The US could do all this stuff at the current tax levels, by just slashing the crap out of the military budget, and I'm not talking about body armor or anything we usually think of when we think of the military budget. There is so much pork in there (and yet we still sometimes can't provide our troops with what they need!) that if we cut it all out, we could do really great things for ourselves at the same price.
Taxes aren't bad unless they don't provide value for money. In sane countries, they do.
Adopt a kid and find out what the other side is like.
I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in raising someone else's kid. Like I said, I'm not really that bothered by not having kids. It's kind of a bummer, but I don't stay awake nights, unless it's to drink and play video games--things I couldn't--or, rather, wouldn't--do if I had a kid. The nursing home/ashes thing was a self-deprecating joke. If my grandparents' deaths are any indication, I'll be so senile by then that it won't matter if the person at my bedside is my own kin or the Grim Reaper himself. And who cares about my ashes?
Back to the original point, I heartily agree that I don't know what it's like. But I know that I don't know what it's like and therefore, when a lot of people with kids tell me what it's like, I'm inclined to assume that they know better than me, and adjust my expectations accordingly. I believe that most people are normal and capable of living their lives and aren't trying to get away with anything. There are exceptions, but they are extremely uncommon. Most people are good people (or, rather, no worse than me), so I trust them when they say it's a lot to take in.
That being said, and I'm going way OT here, I have friends who are still the people I knew before they had kids, and I have others who turned into the shitty adults we all hated when we were kids. What I have noticed, though, is that it's the former ones who still have us 'round for dinner, and the latter who sequester their kids away from the Childless People. It's also the former ones who have kids I don't mind sharing an evening with--because they know how to act like normal human beings--and it's the others whose kids are a terror--probably because their parents' smothering/protecting behavior is leading to severe social retardation.
But again, what do I know? I don't have kids.
Those of you who don't have kids, won't get it.
I know, because it's not like we don't have any siblings with kids or friends with kids or were kids ourselves. We know nothing about kids, or parenting, or... what is it you call it? Family?
Please never, ever, ever say this. It is so unbelievably insulting. I actually can think of a couple childless people I know who seemed to be clueless about the lifestyle of coworkers with kids, but I can count them on one hand.
No, I don't know personally what it's like to be responsible for someone's physical and emotional well-being, but I've seen it done, and it looks pretty hard. I don't whine about coworkers with kids until it seems like they use it as a blanket excuse for why they can't do anything even when every other parent is fine with it. You know exactly what I'm talking about (unless you're the one who is always dropping the ball "because of the kids"). It's a mean trick to play on someone, to make them feel like they are directly harming the development of a little child by asking that someone pull their weight.
Then there's the other side. My wife and I can't have kids. That's okay with us; we've gotten over being depressed about it, and have just decided to be active with our families in other ways in the hopes that maybe a niece or nephew might visit us in the nursing home, or at least pick up our ashes. But try selling that to a boss if you don't have kids. People without kids still have families and still want to be connected to them, but unless those family members fell out of your own crotch, they don't really count. It's not like I'm saying "I can't make it to that meeting; my dad has the sniffles." But "Any way I can get out of that unscheduled meeting you threw right in the middle of my family reunion weekend?"
Ugh, why am I even bothering?
Those of you who have kids won't get it. ;-)
I'm a college prof now, too, and I concur.
And I guess that's what I was doing. I kinda thought I was so great that I didn't need to worry about the consequences, and that is why I called our be-dreadlocked grandparent a child. There is a very small standard deviation on intelligence, I think, and even if you're pretty smart, you're far from alone in that. You won't be given any special treatment until you have really, really proven yourself or unless you are really, really smart. Refusing to submit to totally reasonable norms like business wear is arrogant and a symptom of much more serious attitudinal problems that most employers just plain don't want to take a chance with.
That being said, I think we, as profs, need to remember South Park's wisdom: "There is a time and a place for everything. And that's college." I can't be too hard on people for screwing up; this is the safe place we as a society have created precisely for screwing up.
The problem arises when you get out of college and still think it's okay to screw up.
Black, European-fit collared shirts, tight black non-jeans, kinda clunky black (shined--always shined) shoes with thick soles, short black carefully mussed hair, four small hoop earrings (2 in each ear). This was my work attire.
Not conflating anything. I wasn't showing up in bondage wear or anything.
Good luck moving up in your company, then (unless you're in design or something).
Looking the part is an important part of playing the part. I'm sorry, but it's true. The higher you go, the more likely it will be that you will need to represent the company at some time, and your appearance may not present an image that is good for the company.
Take your appearance, as you've described yourself here, for example. You would have to knock my socks on their asses before I bought anything from you. Why? Because I have a very negative reaction to dreadlocks. I think they're disgusting. And if you're not black, those are best not described as dreadlocks, but "matted, filthy, homeless hair." You might be the nicest guy in the world. I might want to hang out with you (you'd endure endless shit for the dreadlocks, though), but I don't want to have anything to do with your company because I don't know of any good companies that would let you out of the basement, let alone hire you. It reflects poorly on the company.
I don't want you to think I'm just coming down on you like "the Man," man. This is, in fact, all new to me. I'm 35 now, but I was a goth until I was about 29. I wasn't dirty (very few goths are); I dressed well (just all black), and I'm a pretty smart cookie. But it just seemed like I couldn't make anything happen. No one would hire me for anything worthwhile, despite my solid academic record and recommendations from previous employers. I blamed all sorts of things--the economy (okay, that had a hand in it), stupid HR people (is there any other kind?), the time I got diarrhea from eating the expired food in my fridge (all I had left) during the interview--but once the (tasteful--not tribal) earrings were removed, hair was returned to natural brown, and I threw some more colors into my wardrobe, things picked up almost immediately.
I'm not saying that appearance is really a good indication of your abilities. It isn't; we all know that. What I'm saying is that it's like proper spelling: We value it not for what it is, but what it implies: This person gives a shit. This person has gone through some of the same shaping experiences as I have, and which I have found to be important in my own life.
So, to be honest, as a former adherent to the "looks don't matter, man; it's all about self-expression, man" school of thought, I'm probably more likely to write you off as a petulant child, because I sure as hell was one myself when I thought I was too good to put on a pair of slacks and a dress shirt.
No one likes wearing business wear. You're not special because you want to look like a freak. Everyone wants that. But they don't so as to create a more coherent social community with tribal markings that facilitate a feeling of belonging and fraternity. It's not about the suppression of savage customs; it's about being polite to one another and making people feel at ease.
It would be no different if the business community standardized on strap-on dildos and horse-tail butt-plugs. We'd still wear them to create a community. (Un?)Fortunately, business attire has not taken such a fashion direction, so it's slacks and collared shirts for all.