Thats rather simplistic. Like Tiger Woods can always hit a hole in one? So if he misses one, then you can say he he's incapible?
Of course not. That's a stupid analogy, because these dowsers don't just claim "I went in my back yard and found water once". They claim they can do it on command, reliably, which is why they charge for their service.
Like if someone were to claim the could control the flip of a coin, they either could or not, Right? Lets say someone made that claim, and under controlled conditions with a normal coin was able to produce Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads,Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads. My expectation of Randi would be that he's the kind of guy who would claim that HHHHHHHHHH is just a likely a sequence as any other sequence of 10 flips, ergo its not paranormal. Just my opinion.
Except it's not as likely as any other sequence, so Alternate Universe Randi would be wrong.
It's possible for that sequence to come up by chance, though. So the next step would be to say, "OK, that was cool, now let's see you do it again. You can come back tomorrow or next week if your powers need time to recharge." If he can influence the coin reliably, we can conclude he has paranormal powers and give him the million dollars. If not, we can conclude that he just got really, really lucky on the first attempt.
Assume with me for a moment that people have spirits which exist before birth and after death. (Stay with me here, a significant portion of the world's population believes this!)
I'll try to stay with you, but 95% of my brain is screaming "NO! THERE IS NO RATIONAL EXPLANATION AND NOT ONE SCRAP OF EVIDENCE FOR THIS! A BILLION SUPERSTITIOUS SHEEP CAN ALL BE WRONG!"
Many other people who haven't experienced it themselves still WANT to believe it happens. A sort of a wait-that-rings-a-bell gut reaction.
A lot of people also want to believe they can make $75,000 a month by filling out surveys, or avoid paying taxes by claiming that they're "sovereign citizens" and pointing to the yellow fringes on the courtroom flag. It's just wishful thinking.
Now, if this were fact instead of fiction, doesn't it follow that we are all telepathic? But as an inherent capability, one we don't know how to use, a lot of noise is transmitted. Like a newborn trying out his lungs, we bellow and wail a lot.
So now we have a situation where we're all telepathic, some people notice it, make some claims, and those who find the idea preposterous start shutting them down. The feedback isn't just verbal though, they are inadvertantly shouting them down telepathically as well.
OK. This is what we call a hypothesis. The next step, if you want to advance it any further, is to find evidence supporting it. Come up with an experiment that would have one outcome if your hypothesis is true, and a different outcome if it's false.
I mean, we can all sit back and make wild, unprovable claims: "Dude, what if our whole universe is just a grain of sand in some alien's sandbox?" It's fun to think about, especially if you're high, but if it can't be proved one way or the other then it's just mental masturbation.
From your comments: An interesting note in this regard is that "psychics" interviewed by CIA evaluators said the program worked well as long as it was run by those "who accepted the phenomenon." Sorry, guys, but objective scientific results shouldn't depend on who's running a study!
Perhaps it DOES depend on who's running the study... and who's in the building, in the city, etc. Perhaps the biggest reason that claimants can't demonstrate their ability scientifically, is because we've made a dramatic blundering assumption, that it only depends on the one or two people being tested!
The problem with that logic is we already have a well-known, widely accepted explanation for this kind of result: when faced with ambiguous or random information, people are naturally inclined to find the result they're looking for.
You know those pictures that are like two heads facing each other if you look at it one way, or a candlestick if you look at it the other way? If you hand that to someone and say "Hey, check out this candlestick", they'll see the candlestick.
That was the problem with the CIA study. You hand an ambiguous drawing made by a "psychic" to a guy who's trying to match it against one of four master pictures, and if he knows which one is correct and expects the psychic to find the correct picture, he'll be more likely to think it really does match that one.
You can't run a scientific study that way. That's why studies on new medicines use double blinds, for example, where neither the patients nor the doctors know who is receiving the new drug or a placebo until the study is over. If patients know they're receiving the new drug, they tend to report that they're feeling better, whether it really has any effect or not; and if doctors know which patients are receiving the new drug, they'll tend to report the same symptoms differently in those patients.
What that boils down to is that even if psychic powers really do work better when the psychic is surrounded by believers, you can't just take an study that was run by a bunch of believe
More specifically, the study was more likely to reach outcome X when it was run by people who expected outcome X. That's why well-run studies use independent judges, double blinds, etc.
One kind of trial had a better than guessing result. The other was the same as guessing. Randi averaged the two results to minimize them, even though they were really different experiments. Clark complained about this in his afterword.
When this is the best criticism you can come up with, it's time to throw in the towel. If there really was any truth behind dowsing, you wouldn't have to point to a solitary trial; there would be reams of evidence for dowsing, and Randi wouldn't be able to hide it with such trifling statistical tricks.
I find some merit in the criticism of Randi's CSICOP organization impiled by it satirical twin CSICON
Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal
Which according to writer Robert Anton Wilson offers a prize of 1 million irish pounds to anyone who can produce "a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary."
An example of the difficulty in this has been given: "The average Canadian has one testicle, just like Adolf Hitler -- or, more precisely, the average Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler's, if the average Anything actually existed." Ergo if you can find a canadian with exactly 0.96 testicles, you could win the prize.
Interesting... I find that it has no merit at all. The comparison is invalid. What Randi is asking for proof of really isn't that sneaky or complicated. One might argue about the definition of "average" or "normal", but dowsing and ESP are pretty clear-cut: either you can find buried water or you can't.
The U.S. government financed development of 'remote viewing' for over 20 years. It's said that the spooks hated the program, but because they got results, right from the start, they allowed it to continue until the soviet union broke apart.
Actually, they didn't get results:
In one particular study on remote viewing, the "psychics" scored above the result expected from chance by getting the right answer approximately 33% of the time when there were four choices, which Science News characterized as "a moderate increase over chance." But the judgment of success was determined by the project's director, who rated the similarity of each response to the target display and to other randomly chosen pictures. Hyman argued that these studies offer no insight as to why the scoring is above chance--it's just assumed that it must be psychic ability. He also noted that the accuracy ratings should have been done by independent judges--not the project director--and that none of the studies have yet undergone peer review. In other words, there were severe methodological flaws in those studies that did seem to show a hint of something. Indeed, a former CIA technical director who monitored these programs said on Nightline that he wasn't aware of any significant results from the "psychics."
An interesting note in this regard is that "psychics" interviewed by CIA evaluators said the program worked well as long as it was run by those "who accepted the phenomenon." Sorry, guys, but objective scientific results shouldn't depend on who's running a study! (The Straight Dope)
The only form of "remote viewing" that has been shown to work involves a video camera, a monitor, and a cable or wireless link connecting them.
[quoting:] Why do they not stand up and be counted? For the most part, they are afraid of being taken apart in the press, afraid of being ridiculed for doing their duty in an area of threat analysis which was completely justified.
What a load of bullshit. It'd only take one person who actually has these magical powers, and is willing to demonstrate them, to legitimize the whole thing. If there were visible proof that even a single person is psychic, claims of psychic abilities would be taken far more seriously. The first person to stand up and prove his magical powers would be a hero, vindicating everyone else who has been ridiculed for making such claims. But so far, everyone who has attempted to prove them has failed, and most people who make the claims make no attempt to prove them at all ("it doesn't work when nonbelievers are around", "I'm not in this for fame or money or contributing to human understanding", etc.).
[quoting:] I now direct your attention to "successful remote viewing," and ask you to wonder if it can exist. Begin by considering psychics who successfully help the police.
Again, there is no such thing. The success rate of so-called psychics solving crimes is no better than educated guessing.
... a fraud with an agenda. He's no different that a bible-thumping jesus freak, except he beats the "materialist" drum.
Well, there's also the slight difference that he has facts on his side. None of these so-called "people who can" have ever been able to demonstrate their alleged abilities under controlled conditions. Until they can do that, they're nothing more than "people who lie to others", or at best, "people who lie to themselves".
But as one "super-psychic" points out, even scientists now say that matter-as-we-know-it only makes up between 4 and 7% of the universe. The rest is labeled as "dark matter" and "dark energy". They don't know what exactly it is, but that plain matter is inadequate to explain the measurements taken by cosmologists.... [some "super psychic"] pointed out that "dark energy" interpenetrates everything, and is the carrier medium for experiences previously labeled "extra-sensory".
I see. It's a pity that there's no evidence that these experiences actually took place in reality, not just in the participants' imaginations, don't you think? Because if there were evidence, someone would be a million dollars richer.
Don't know how much poker you have been playing lately, but unless you are playing 1/2 cent games, I don't think it's accurate to say that people who play poker online are weaker than those in casinos.
Well, I'll bow to your experience, because I do play at the lowest stakes. I'm not a professional and I don't want to risk $50 at the casino when I could risk $10 online.
I mean in this day, is anyone really more than a few hours away from an Indian casino? Do you really need 24/7 access to gambling?
Playing poker online isn't the same as playing in a casino, for a few reasons:
The strategy is different, because you can't see anyone's face.
There are a lot more clueless players online (read: people you can win money from), because what kind of rookie is going to play poker at a casino when all those table games are placed more prominently and easier to get started with?
In fact, there are a lot more players online in general, which means there are more games: you can always find the game you're looking for, at any bet level and any game type. 50 cent 7-stud? $5 Razz? 90 player Hold'em tournament? No problem. At a brick and mortar casino, you're limited to whichever tables happen to be open at the time.
You can play faster online, and you can play more than one table at once.
But perhaps most importantly, it's cheaper to play online. There's less rake (typically 5% vs. a casino's 10%), and the stakes are much lower: just try finding a live poker game where the minimum bet is 10 cents. Even $1 games are hard to find.
BTW, preventing online gambling won't prevent anyone from having 24/7 access to gambling. The card room down the street from my house is only closed about 4 hours a day. The Indian casino just outside of town is open 24 hours on weekends.
Maybe, just maybe, our elected legislators have our best interest in heart this time.
Ridiculous. If that's what they had in mind, they'd regulate online gambling instead of banning it - or they'd ban all online gambling instead of making exceptions for horse racing and state lotteries. (In fact, they'd probably ban state lotteries entirely if they really wanted to keep people from wasting their money on gambling.)
Nope... you know whose best interest is served by this bill (and Washington's recent ban)? Brick and mortar casinos. That's all.
"this copyrighted work is licensed for home viewing only. Unauthroized display, duplication and distribution is prohibited. All rights reserved."
I can not agree that home media is not licensed, because it is. It's painfully clear in the fine print that it's yours to use, watch, but not to duplicate and distribute.
Heh, I'm afraid not. Fine print on a DVD box has no effect whatsoever on your rights to use the DVD. You don't need a license to use or watch it; you'd only need a license to copy or publically perform it, and you don't get either of those licenses when you buy the DVD.
Let me ask you this... if a screen came up at the beginning of a DVD saying "This copyrighted work is a heaping bowl of ice cream", would that mean it really is? Or would it just mean the screen is incorrect?
The problem is that our actions, when taken in public, can have an effect on an awful lot of people. Riding without a helmet? Great. When you wreck and live in a persistent vegetative state, the Insurance Company has to cover it. The problem is, I'm paying into the same insurance company you are, so my rates (may) go up, just because you were too stupid to put a hat on your noggin. Ditto with seatbelts, only now you may have 4 people in comas for the rest of their life, and the cost increases dramatically.
Are you sure you want to make this argument? Because by this logic, we should outlaw football, skiing, and any other dangerous sport (to say nothing of driving!). After all, why should I have to pay higher health insurance premiums because you broke your leg or crashed into a tree?
The fact is, exercising freedom sometimes has costs. Insurance is designed to share those costs. That means most people will end up paying more in premiums than they ever receive in benefits, while a few people will receive most of the benefits. If you don't like that arrangement, you aren't going to be happy with any insurance system.
If there was no monetary pain to me, at all, because you didn't want to wear a seatbelt or a helmet, go for it. After all, it is your life. If you can ensure that I don't have to pay a cent more because you want to risk it, I'm all for you not wearing helmets or belts. Or, rather, I'm all for your freedom to do as you wish. It's not my fucking job to keep you alive. I may tell you you're stupid and to put a seatbelt on, but that's just freedom of speech. It's not like you have to do what I say.
Uh huh. Now think about how easy it would be to replace "because you didn't want to wear a seatbelt or a helmet" with "because you wanted to drive your own car instead of taking the bus", or "because you wanted to live downtown instead of in the suburbs". If you want to live in a society with any degree of freedom, you're going to have to accept the fact that you'll be paying for some of your fellow citizens' mistakes - but at least you'll know that they'll be around to pay for your mistakes, should you ever make any.
The big problem with that approach for ABC, of course, is that it requires that you have decent television that people will actually shell out a few bucks a month to watch.
Perhaps you've heard of "Lost", one of the most popular dramas of the last couple years, and a show which people actually do shell out a few bucks to download from iTunes.
Can you give me one example where that's worked because of the standing up, not just as a coincidence (USA lifting of export restrictions on encryption)?
Standing up to religious fundamentalists? Sure, have three: abortion rights, prayer in schools, and creationism in science class.
My experience is when geeks stand up for a cause they are lucky if 1 non-IT reporter turns up.
Censoring the internet isn't a "geek issue" any more than censoring TV is an electrical engineer issue. Most of the people watching Big Brother online, or any other streaming video, aren't geeks.
Extending the broadcast license to all content produced by broadcast license holder means something has been done about controlling the filth on the net and protecting the children, without having actually done anything. "We" have failed miserably at blocking stupid moves by our government in the past, i think "we" are better off encouraging them in a different direction with an easy option that has fewer real effects.
Aha. So you're giving away a little freedom in the hopes that it'll sate the pro-censorship bloc's appetite and you won't have to give up a lot of freedom.
I hate to break it to you, but if your fundies are anything like ours, they'll never be satisfied. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. The real solution is to stand up to them.
I do NOT want the web censored, which is why i'm happy to see commercial broadcasters, the tiny minority of firms in australia that have been given public airwaves as a gift (and digital tv benefits too), have the reponsibility to adhear to basic broadcast standards (censorship) no matter the medium they peddle their crud.
How can you not see the contradiction here? "I do NOT want the web censored, which is why i'm happy to see [certain web sites censored]."
I'm all for porn, free speech and the like, in fact i'm a huge user, but if you have a commerical broadcast license to use our airwaves you should have the onus put on you to ensure all you produce and distribute is suitable to all of the public, or suitably labelled.
Nonsense. What does having a license to broadcast over the airwaves have to do with streaming over the internet?
This is a simple way to stop Channel 10 net-broadcasting their rubbish, and lets every other company in the world except Channel 10, 7 and Nine broadcast whatever they like on the net to Australians. You may call that censorship if you want, but to me censoring a couple of commercial businesses and not censoring everyone else is a pretty good trade-off.
I'm not buying it. Where's the "trade-off"? Why do you need to censor any streams at all? How would censoring TV stations' web sites help to ensure that other web sites don't get censored?
Here's my proposal: Don't censor the net. Let channels 10, 7, and Nine, and everyone else, stream whatever they like to Australians. Keep the existing restrictions for TV broadcasting. Doesn't that sound like a better deal?
If you have a broadcast license [...] you should be held accountable to broadcast standards no matter the medium.
If you don't have a broadcast license you should be able to do whatever you want with your webcam. Television has a lot of power. Setting up a webcam in my kitchen isn't going to draw hundreds of thousands of viewers, but when a TV station comes along and does it, with all the promotion and hoo-ha that goes with it, then people will watch it.
Er, so you're saying it's OK to censor popular content? Why should it matter how many people will see something when you're deciding whether it should be legal to transmit a video? By that logic, it's OK to censor Slashdot but not smaller news sites, Google but not smaller search engines, etc.
("it [an internet stream] isn't forcing itself upon anyone")
Neither is a television broadcast, one still has to purchase the correct equipment, tune the television to that channel (in order to receive it) and then still choose to watch that particular channel. IMHO from the perspective of broadcasting that is basically no different to an internet stream, there are technical differences (the many different tubes) but that doesn't really matter.
I disagree. A TV is only capable of receiving a finite number of channels. If you own a TV, you can sit there and flip through the dial and see everything being broadcast. There is no equivalent for the internet - you can't flip through every web page and accidentally stumble upon something offensive. You have to go seek it out, or at least seek out another site that redirects you to something offensive.
Dont forget that Big Brother is a television show that is *also* broadcast on the net. The network felt that they could not show this on TV in the middle of the night, so why should should they feel the net is somehow different.
Because it is different. The fact that you can come across a TV show accidentally and you can't come across a web site accidentally really is important, if you're worried about people being offended accidentally. So is the fact that one is done with the public's resources and the other isn't, if you're worried about having your tax dollars or electromagnetic spectrum being misused. The motivation for censoring TV is more than just "it's wrong to transmit anything offensive".
At least, it's more than that here in the US, and you know us: we're a nation of prudes. Are Australians so much more prudish that they really do believe it's wrong to transmit anything offensive, regardless of how easy it is for someone to find it unintentionally?
Dont get me wrong I disagree with the censorship, they should have been allowed (or felt that they were allowed) to show the event on both forms of media.
This I can agree with. No one has ever died (or even been injured) from being exposed to sexual material, no matter whose resources were involved or whether it was accidental or intentional. Censorship is BS in both cases, but the reasons for censoring one don't apply to the other.
The incident would have been illegal if it had been shown on traditional media and as it happened and was broadcast within Austrialia to Austrailians, why is it unfair for the Prime Minister to call for the broadcasting laws and restrictions to extend from older types of media (the television) to newer forms (such as internet streaming). [...] Now I dont know if Big Brother in Oz is streamed free to the public, but I would assume that it is, so I would imagine that the 'protect the children' (kneejerk) principle actually has some weight for once. If the stream was to registered adults (paying customers) then it would be different.
Well, there's a big difference between internet and TV.
At least in the US, the reasoning goes that the government is entitled to regulate the content of TV broadcasts because the airwaves belong to the public. The amount of spectrum available for broadcasting is limited, and since the people are allowing private entities to use that limited resource, they (through their representatives) have the right to decide how it may be used. Cable TV doesn't use public resources, so it can't be censored except under the same laws that could be used to censor books or magazines (obscenity, copyright, national security, etc.).
The internet works differently. As we all know, it's a series of TUBES, and those tubes belong to private entities. Furthermore, unlike broadcasts, which are pushed invisibly from a transmitter through the air in your home (and which are passing through your body right this second!), internet streams are delivered only to those who request them. Whether or not you have to pay for the stream is irrelevant; either way, it isn't forcing itself upon anyone. It's like comparing a mass mailing to a box of pamphlets which you can take if you're interested: it'd be silly to complain about the content of the pamphlet when you made the decision to seek it out.
Finally, the kneejerk "protect the children" principle never has any weight, because there's no evidence whatsoever that children need to be "protected" from content like this. It's an argument based on gut feelings rather than fact.
As far as current cameraphones go, (picking semi-randomly...) a Treo 700p has a 312MHz XScale processor, and a PPC-6700 has a 416 MHz XScale. Both have 1.3 megapixel cameras.
Those are smartphones, not camera phones. Don't expect the average camera phone to have anywhere near that much CPU power.
So all we get is Halo sequels then? Remember, people have tried to raise funds for additional episodes of shows like Star Trek and Firefly, and failed.
If there isn't enough commercial interest in producing those episodes, maybe they shouldn't be produced (commercially, at least).
Consider that under the most common business model currently used for copyrighted works, many works are produced which never recoup their production costs. An artist records a CD, gets an advance on royalties, but those royalties never materialize because the CD doesn't sell, and now the artist owes his record label for the money they loaned him. Wouldn't it be better if he could've just realized up front that his CD wouldn't be profitable, and spent his time on something else instead - or perhaps gone through and recorded the CD, but without the false hope that it'd earn him a living?
If we can't use the street performer method to raise money to pay for popular TV shows how do you expect to fund projects by unknowns?
Unknowns can get funding by providing samples (portfolios) of the work they're capable of producing.
More to the point, why are these new business models the only business models that are allowed? Because people will just take what they want if you don't follow these new ways?
Because the old business model has always been on shaky ground, and advances in technology are just making that more clear. The old business model treats information like a physical product: you manufacture a thousand units, then sell each one for more than it cost to manufacture. Problem is, there isn't really a "unit" of a song, a movie, or any other bit of information. You either have access to it (i.e. you know which large number you need to feed into your MP3 player to hear that song) or you don't, and you can share that access (i.e. tell your friend what the number is) without depriving anyone else or incurring any extra costs for anyone.
You can't easily prevent people from sharing information with each other, and even if you can do it to an extent, to do so is literally to suppress free speech. The laws are inherently unenforceable, but the business model doesn't work without them, and at some point (let's call it 1998) you've got laws which were intended to prop up this business model but whose effect reaches much further, and the costs to society outweigh the benefits.
I don't think that's just a fluke of our particular set of laws; I think it's an inevitable result of a well-funded lobby whose profits depend on the law forcing things to behave unnaturally. Imagine if some bizarre new industry were to spring up which could provide a popular service in your city, but their business model depended on water flowing uphill rather than down. Absurd, isn't it? Just think how expensive and invasive the system of pumps would have to be to guarantee that all water in your city flowed from low ground to high ground instead of vice versa. But most people don't bat an eye when confronted with an industry whose business model depends on information being uncopyable, and the expensive, invasive system of laws and technology which attempts to stop copying.
The business model described by the GP, however, doesn't depend on laws that limit anyone's speech, or anything else other than basic contracts. In fact, it's not a "new business model" at all, because it's exactly the same business model used by hundreds of other industries: you get paid for the work you do, no more and no less, and you don't have to do the work at all until someone has agreed to pay you for it.
BluRay is hardly useless to those like myself for whom DVD is insufficient on our television sets.
That must be who Sony is targeting - the people who are willing to spend $600 on a console are the same ones who'll spend $2000 on an HDTV set. (I only know one person who actually owns such a thing, but if you have one also, that makes at least two potential PS3 buyers.)
Unfortunately, I think the market of people for whom DVD is insufficient is a pretty damn slim one. It'll still be years before any significant percentage of homes have a high-definition TV.
I haven't had any luck at all getting Ubuntu (or Knoppix) to work with my wireless network. What, am I supposed to just turn off security (i.e. switch to WEP) to get online with Linux?
That comment is every bit as ignorant, offensive, and untrue as "Mexicans are idiots".
Treating teenagers as adults means granting them rights and responsibilities. There might be a few mature ones, but in the main, I would simply be unfair and unjust to hoist full adult responsibilities on the shoulders of someone that young.
You say "hoist" as if this is something being forced on them, when in fact, these are rights and responsibilities that they want.
To say that the minors "consented" ignores the fact that minors are legally unentitled to consent to just about anything.
And your response ignores the caveat I made when I said that. Yes, legally minors can't consent - just like legally, ketchup is a vegetable, everyone who possesses more than N ounces of pot is a drug dealer, and people who give up looking for a job aren't unemployed.
We, however, are not writing laws here, and we're not bound by those fictional definitions of terms like "consent". Consent in the real world is simply a matter of knowing what you're being asked to do, what it entails, and what it can lead to, and then stating whether or not you want to do it. Consenting to sex is fundamentally no different from consenting to join the football team or eat steak for dinner; the differences are simply the specific bits of knowledge needed to make an informed decision. And that knowledge is easily covered in health class.
Minors, in general, cannot set up a business, agree to contracts, marry, buy a house, drive a car, be paid a full wage; yet you argue that they can be treated as adults when it comes to one of the few things that really counts.
I'd argue that they should be treated as adults in those other situations too, when appropriate, but that's not really the topic at hand.
My view is that once someone is deemed old enough to consent to sex, the there is nothing else that you can ethically or morally deny them. That includes the right to vote, work, drink, marry, etc, etc. You've deemed them to be full adults and that means they have all the right you have.
That's a bizarre outlook. Why is sex the most important right? It seems to me the right to vote is the most fundamental, because once you can vote, you have the power to grant yourself whichever other rights you want.
People who coax out teenagers for sex aren't interested in a relationship or in a future. How could they? Their victims are minors. They choose their targets well, use their weaknesses against them. All for their own, purely sexual gratification.
You seem to be saying there's something wrong with sex for the sake of sex, and that minors are incapable of having relationships or "futures". What is your basis for these claims?
Some say that these teenagers deserve to be molested for being stupid. But the punishment doesn't fit the crime. We were all young once, and did plenty of stupid things.
I don't see anyone saying they deserve to be molested. In fact, I don't see any claims of molestation at all - consensual sex is not molestation (and yes, minors can give consent, even if the law ignores it).
Indeed.. teenagers are some of the ideal consumers of drugs, actually. They don't have much money, but what they do have is all disposable income. They don't have any real responsibilities, so unlike a parent or a lifeguard, nothing bad will happen if they're unable to respond to some situation because they're high. Their bodies are healthy, so the side effects of drug use likely won't have the same impact as they would on an adult.
In my opinion, at least selling, and for that matter trading (like in the old mailbox days, give me n, then you can have m of mine), since they provide an incentive for producing more. One could argue that paying for child porn should be illegal for the same reason.
OTOH, if selling were legal, it'd be easy to find the people who create and sell new material, and arrest them for the crime of producing it.
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Of course not. That's a stupid analogy, because these dowsers don't just claim "I went in my back yard and found water once". They claim they can do it on command, reliably, which is why they charge for their service.
Except it's not as likely as any other sequence, so Alternate Universe Randi would be wrong.
It's possible for that sequence to come up by chance, though. So the next step would be to say, "OK, that was cool, now let's see you do it again. You can come back tomorrow or next week if your powers need time to recharge." If he can influence the coin reliably, we can conclude he has paranormal powers and give him the million dollars. If not, we can conclude that he just got really, really lucky on the first attempt.
I'll try to stay with you, but 95% of my brain is screaming "NO! THERE IS NO RATIONAL EXPLANATION AND NOT ONE SCRAP OF EVIDENCE FOR THIS! A BILLION SUPERSTITIOUS SHEEP CAN ALL BE WRONG!"
A lot of people also want to believe they can make $75,000 a month by filling out surveys, or avoid paying taxes by claiming that they're "sovereign citizens" and pointing to the yellow fringes on the courtroom flag. It's just wishful thinking.
OK. This is what we call a hypothesis. The next step, if you want to advance it any further, is to find evidence supporting it. Come up with an experiment that would have one outcome if your hypothesis is true, and a different outcome if it's false.
I mean, we can all sit back and make wild, unprovable claims: "Dude, what if our whole universe is just a grain of sand in some alien's sandbox?" It's fun to think about, especially if you're high, but if it can't be proved one way or the other then it's just mental masturbation.
The problem with that logic is we already have a well-known, widely accepted explanation for this kind of result: when faced with ambiguous or random information, people are naturally inclined to find the result they're looking for.
You know those pictures that are like two heads facing each other if you look at it one way, or a candlestick if you look at it the other way? If you hand that to someone and say "Hey, check out this candlestick", they'll see the candlestick.
That was the problem with the CIA study. You hand an ambiguous drawing made by a "psychic" to a guy who's trying to match it against one of four master pictures, and if he knows which one is correct and expects the psychic to find the correct picture, he'll be more likely to think it really does match that one.
You can't run a scientific study that way. That's why studies on new medicines use double blinds, for example, where neither the patients nor the doctors know who is receiving the new drug or a placebo until the study is over. If patients know they're receiving the new drug, they tend to report that they're feeling better, whether it really has any effect or not; and if doctors know which patients are receiving the new drug, they'll tend to report the same symptoms differently in those patients.
What that boils down to is that even if psychic powers really do work better when the psychic is surrounded by believers, you can't just take an study that was run by a bunch of believe
More specifically, the study was more likely to reach outcome X when it was run by people who expected outcome X. That's why well-run studies use independent judges, double blinds, etc.
When this is the best criticism you can come up with, it's time to throw in the towel. If there really was any truth behind dowsing, you wouldn't have to point to a solitary trial; there would be reams of evidence for dowsing, and Randi wouldn't be able to hide it with such trifling statistical tricks.
Interesting... I find that it has no merit at all. The comparison is invalid. What Randi is asking for proof of really isn't that sneaky or complicated. One might argue about the definition of "average" or "normal", but dowsing and ESP are pretty clear-cut: either you can find buried water or you can't.
Actually, they didn't get results:
In one particular study on remote viewing, the "psychics" scored above the result expected from chance by getting the right answer approximately 33% of the time when there were four choices, which Science News characterized as "a moderate increase over chance." But the judgment of success was determined by the project's director, who rated the similarity of each response to the target display and to other randomly chosen pictures. Hyman argued that these studies offer no insight as to why the scoring is above chance--it's just assumed that it must be psychic ability. He also noted that the accuracy ratings should have been done by independent judges--not the project director--and that none of the studies have yet undergone peer review. In other words, there were severe methodological flaws in those studies that did seem to show a hint of something. Indeed, a former CIA technical director who monitored these programs said on Nightline that he wasn't aware of any significant results from the "psychics."
An interesting note in this regard is that "psychics" interviewed by CIA evaluators said the program worked well as long as it was run by those "who accepted the phenomenon." Sorry, guys, but objective scientific results shouldn't depend on who's running a study! (The Straight Dope)
The only form of "remote viewing" that has been shown to work involves a video camera, a monitor, and a cable or wireless link connecting them.
What a load of bullshit. It'd only take one person who actually has these magical powers, and is willing to demonstrate them, to legitimize the whole thing. If there were visible proof that even a single person is psychic, claims of psychic abilities would be taken far more seriously. The first person to stand up and prove his magical powers would be a hero, vindicating everyone else who has been ridiculed for making such claims. But so far, everyone who has attempted to prove them has failed, and most people who make the claims make no attempt to prove them at all ("it doesn't work when nonbelievers are around", "I'm not in this for fame or money or contributing to human understanding", etc.).
Again, there is no such thing. The success rate of so-called psychics solving crimes is no better than educated guessing.
Well, there's also the slight difference that he has facts on his side. None of these so-called "people who can" have ever been able to demonstrate their alleged abilities under controlled conditions. Until they can do that, they're nothing more than "people who lie to others", or at best, "people who lie to themselves".
I see. It's a pity that there's no evidence that these experiences actually took place in reality, not just in the participants' imaginations, don't you think? Because if there were evidence, someone would be a million dollars richer.
Well, I'll bow to your experience, because I do play at the lowest stakes. I'm not a professional and I don't want to risk $50 at the casino when I could risk $10 online.
Playing poker online isn't the same as playing in a casino, for a few reasons:
The strategy is different, because you can't see anyone's face.
There are a lot more clueless players online (read: people you can win money from), because what kind of rookie is going to play poker at a casino when all those table games are placed more prominently and easier to get started with?
In fact, there are a lot more players online in general, which means there are more games: you can always find the game you're looking for, at any bet level and any game type. 50 cent 7-stud? $5 Razz? 90 player Hold'em tournament? No problem. At a brick and mortar casino, you're limited to whichever tables happen to be open at the time.
You can play faster online, and you can play more than one table at once.
But perhaps most importantly, it's cheaper to play online. There's less rake (typically 5% vs. a casino's 10%), and the stakes are much lower: just try finding a live poker game where the minimum bet is 10 cents. Even $1 games are hard to find.
BTW, preventing online gambling won't prevent anyone from having 24/7 access to gambling. The card room down the street from my house is only closed about 4 hours a day. The Indian casino just outside of town is open 24 hours on weekends.
Ridiculous. If that's what they had in mind, they'd regulate online gambling instead of banning it - or they'd ban all online gambling instead of making exceptions for horse racing and state lotteries. (In fact, they'd probably ban state lotteries entirely if they really wanted to keep people from wasting their money on gambling.)
Nope... you know whose best interest is served by this bill (and Washington's recent ban)? Brick and mortar casinos. That's all.
Heh, I'm afraid not. Fine print on a DVD box has no effect whatsoever on your rights to use the DVD. You don't need a license to use or watch it; you'd only need a license to copy or publically perform it, and you don't get either of those licenses when you buy the DVD.
Let me ask you this... if a screen came up at the beginning of a DVD saying "This copyrighted work is a heaping bowl of ice cream", would that mean it really is? Or would it just mean the screen is incorrect?
Are you sure you want to make this argument? Because by this logic, we should outlaw football, skiing, and any other dangerous sport (to say nothing of driving!). After all, why should I have to pay higher health insurance premiums because you broke your leg or crashed into a tree?
The fact is, exercising freedom sometimes has costs. Insurance is designed to share those costs. That means most people will end up paying more in premiums than they ever receive in benefits, while a few people will receive most of the benefits. If you don't like that arrangement, you aren't going to be happy with any insurance system.
Uh huh. Now think about how easy it would be to replace "because you didn't want to wear a seatbelt or a helmet" with "because you wanted to drive your own car instead of taking the bus", or "because you wanted to live downtown instead of in the suburbs". If you want to live in a society with any degree of freedom, you're going to have to accept the fact that you'll be paying for some of your fellow citizens' mistakes - but at least you'll know that they'll be around to pay for your mistakes, should you ever make any.
Perhaps you've heard of "Lost", one of the most popular dramas of the last couple years, and a show which people actually do shell out a few bucks to download from iTunes.
Standing up to religious fundamentalists? Sure, have three: abortion rights, prayer in schools, and creationism in science class.
Censoring the internet isn't a "geek issue" any more than censoring TV is an electrical engineer issue. Most of the people watching Big Brother online, or any other streaming video, aren't geeks.
Aha. So you're giving away a little freedom in the hopes that it'll sate the pro-censorship bloc's appetite and you won't have to give up a lot of freedom.
I hate to break it to you, but if your fundies are anything like ours, they'll never be satisfied. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. The real solution is to stand up to them.
How can you not see the contradiction here? "I do NOT want the web censored, which is why i'm happy to see [certain web sites censored]."
Nonsense. What does having a license to broadcast over the airwaves have to do with streaming over the internet?
I'm not buying it. Where's the "trade-off"? Why do you need to censor any streams at all? How would censoring TV stations' web sites help to ensure that other web sites don't get censored?
Here's my proposal: Don't censor the net. Let channels 10, 7, and Nine, and everyone else, stream whatever they like to Australians. Keep the existing restrictions for TV broadcasting. Doesn't that sound like a better deal?
Er, so you're saying it's OK to censor popular content? Why should it matter how many people will see something when you're deciding whether it should be legal to transmit a video? By that logic, it's OK to censor Slashdot but not smaller news sites, Google but not smaller search engines, etc.
I disagree. A TV is only capable of receiving a finite number of channels. If you own a TV, you can sit there and flip through the dial and see everything being broadcast. There is no equivalent for the internet - you can't flip through every web page and accidentally stumble upon something offensive. You have to go seek it out, or at least seek out another site that redirects you to something offensive.
Because it is different. The fact that you can come across a TV show accidentally and you can't come across a web site accidentally really is important, if you're worried about people being offended accidentally. So is the fact that one is done with the public's resources and the other isn't, if you're worried about having your tax dollars or electromagnetic spectrum being misused. The motivation for censoring TV is more than just "it's wrong to transmit anything offensive".
At least, it's more than that here in the US, and you know us: we're a nation of prudes. Are Australians so much more prudish that they really do believe it's wrong to transmit anything offensive, regardless of how easy it is for someone to find it unintentionally?
This I can agree with. No one has ever died (or even been injured) from being exposed to sexual material, no matter whose resources were involved or whether it was accidental or intentional. Censorship is BS in both cases, but the reasons for censoring one don't apply to the other.
Well, there's a big difference between internet and TV.
At least in the US, the reasoning goes that the government is entitled to regulate the content of TV broadcasts because the airwaves belong to the public. The amount of spectrum available for broadcasting is limited, and since the people are allowing private entities to use that limited resource, they (through their representatives) have the right to decide how it may be used. Cable TV doesn't use public resources, so it can't be censored except under the same laws that could be used to censor books or magazines (obscenity, copyright, national security, etc.).
The internet works differently. As we all know, it's a series of TUBES, and those tubes belong to private entities. Furthermore, unlike broadcasts, which are pushed invisibly from a transmitter through the air in your home (and which are passing through your body right this second!), internet streams are delivered only to those who request them. Whether or not you have to pay for the stream is irrelevant; either way, it isn't forcing itself upon anyone. It's like comparing a mass mailing to a box of pamphlets which you can take if you're interested: it'd be silly to complain about the content of the pamphlet when you made the decision to seek it out.
Finally, the kneejerk "protect the children" principle never has any weight, because there's no evidence whatsoever that children need to be "protected" from content like this. It's an argument based on gut feelings rather than fact.
As far as current cameraphones go, (picking semi-randomly...) a Treo 700p has a 312MHz XScale processor, and a PPC-6700 has a 416 MHz XScale. Both have 1.3 megapixel cameras.
Those are smartphones, not camera phones. Don't expect the average camera phone to have anywhere near that much CPU power.
So all we get is Halo sequels then? Remember, people have tried to raise funds for additional episodes of shows like Star Trek and Firefly, and failed.
If there isn't enough commercial interest in producing those episodes, maybe they shouldn't be produced (commercially, at least).
Consider that under the most common business model currently used for copyrighted works, many works are produced which never recoup their production costs. An artist records a CD, gets an advance on royalties, but those royalties never materialize because the CD doesn't sell, and now the artist owes his record label for the money they loaned him. Wouldn't it be better if he could've just realized up front that his CD wouldn't be profitable, and spent his time on something else instead - or perhaps gone through and recorded the CD, but without the false hope that it'd earn him a living?
If we can't use the street performer method to raise money to pay for popular TV shows how do you expect to fund projects by unknowns?
Unknowns can get funding by providing samples (portfolios) of the work they're capable of producing.
More to the point, why are these new business models the only business models that are allowed? Because people will just take what they want if you don't follow these new ways?
Because the old business model has always been on shaky ground, and advances in technology are just making that more clear. The old business model treats information like a physical product: you manufacture a thousand units, then sell each one for more than it cost to manufacture. Problem is, there isn't really a "unit" of a song, a movie, or any other bit of information. You either have access to it (i.e. you know which large number you need to feed into your MP3 player to hear that song) or you don't, and you can share that access (i.e. tell your friend what the number is) without depriving anyone else or incurring any extra costs for anyone.
You can't easily prevent people from sharing information with each other, and even if you can do it to an extent, to do so is literally to suppress free speech. The laws are inherently unenforceable, but the business model doesn't work without them, and at some point (let's call it 1998) you've got laws which were intended to prop up this business model but whose effect reaches much further, and the costs to society outweigh the benefits.
I don't think that's just a fluke of our particular set of laws; I think it's an inevitable result of a well-funded lobby whose profits depend on the law forcing things to behave unnaturally. Imagine if some bizarre new industry were to spring up which could provide a popular service in your city, but their business model depended on water flowing uphill rather than down. Absurd, isn't it? Just think how expensive and invasive the system of pumps would have to be to guarantee that all water in your city flowed from low ground to high ground instead of vice versa. But most people don't bat an eye when confronted with an industry whose business model depends on information being uncopyable, and the expensive, invasive system of laws and technology which attempts to stop copying.
The business model described by the GP, however, doesn't depend on laws that limit anyone's speech, or anything else other than basic contracts. In fact, it's not a "new business model" at all, because it's exactly the same business model used by hundreds of other industries: you get paid for the work you do, no more and no less, and you don't have to do the work at all until someone has agreed to pay you for it.
That must be who Sony is targeting - the people who are willing to spend $600 on a console are the same ones who'll spend $2000 on an HDTV set. (I only know one person who actually owns such a thing, but if you have one also, that makes at least two potential PS3 buyers.)
Unfortunately, I think the market of people for whom DVD is insufficient is a pretty damn slim one. It'll still be years before any significant percentage of homes have a high-definition TV.
I haven't had any luck at all getting Ubuntu (or Knoppix) to work with my wireless network. What, am I supposed to just turn off security (i.e. switch to WEP) to get online with Linux?
That comment is every bit as ignorant, offensive, and untrue as "Mexicans are idiots".
You say "hoist" as if this is something being forced on them, when in fact, these are rights and responsibilities that they want.
And your response ignores the caveat I made when I said that. Yes, legally minors can't consent - just like legally, ketchup is a vegetable, everyone who possesses more than N ounces of pot is a drug dealer, and people who give up looking for a job aren't unemployed.
We, however, are not writing laws here, and we're not bound by those fictional definitions of terms like "consent". Consent in the real world is simply a matter of knowing what you're being asked to do, what it entails, and what it can lead to, and then stating whether or not you want to do it. Consenting to sex is fundamentally no different from consenting to join the football team or eat steak for dinner; the differences are simply the specific bits of knowledge needed to make an informed decision. And that knowledge is easily covered in health class.
I'd argue that they should be treated as adults in those other situations too, when appropriate, but that's not really the topic at hand.
That's a bizarre outlook. Why is sex the most important right? It seems to me the right to vote is the most fundamental, because once you can vote, you have the power to grant yourself whichever other rights you want.
You seem to be saying there's something wrong with sex for the sake of sex, and that minors are incapable of having relationships or "futures". What is your basis for these claims?
I don't see anyone saying they deserve to be molested. In fact, I don't see any claims of molestation at all - consensual sex is not molestation (and yes, minors can give consent, even if the law ignores it).
Indeed.. teenagers are some of the ideal consumers of drugs, actually. They don't have much money, but what they do have is all disposable income. They don't have any real responsibilities, so unlike a parent or a lifeguard, nothing bad will happen if they're unable to respond to some situation because they're high. Their bodies are healthy, so the side effects of drug use likely won't have the same impact as they would on an adult.
In my opinion, at least selling, and for that matter trading (like in the old mailbox days, give me n, then you can have m of mine), since they provide an incentive for producing more. One could argue that paying for child porn should be illegal for the same reason.
OTOH, if selling were legal, it'd be easy to find the people who create and sell new material, and arrest them for the crime of producing it.