??? if you cast away every problem, then what problems could you possibly have. Im using this argument for everything from now on. Sure Mr Employer, my foul stench, poor punctuality, massive debt and severe chemical dependence issues may make me a poor candidate for this job. But, if we cast all that aside can you make one good argument that i am not the most qualified? Give me money... I'm jonesing
America as a country is certainly fat. We are probably better than everyone else to, but my time is too valuable to look up another chart for you jealous foreigners.
Thank you for this post. I have a lot to say on this issue, but I am much too tired to get involved. Evidence to bias https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ -check it out.
I was waiting to see if anyone would bring this up. Assuming(perhaps wrongly), that she has full creative control of her project then the decision to patent can only hurt its widespread adoption. If you have one company attempting to squeeze every last penny out of an invention that has a potential to greatly improve the quality of life for a great many, you will end up with a technology that only helps a few, namely the executives of said company.
Of course i must concede that she deserves compensation for her work. But, I argue she has already received much more than adequate compensation. In this article alone it says she has received 216,000$. And if 216,000$ is not in her mind enough for her achievement she can continue to give paid speeches. Also, if she started a non-profit and gave it away she would deeply admired and respected and everyone in the world would want to give her a million hugs. She could then ride that publicity/adoration into more ambitious projects that make her more money and help more people. That would be altruistic. She is not.
P.S. If anyone could give me an example of large scale altruism in a capitalistic society in a situation where the altruist loses something substantial in the actions commission I would greatly appreciate it.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. -Declaration of Independence
to many writers use dialog in movies as a crutch and therefor don't take full advantage of the medium. Its a shame really. Putting the story together for yourself gives you an engaging, active role in the stories development. I find this much more satisfying than having everything spelled out for me. 90% of communication is noverbal and this generally translates terribly to the screen. Clearly im rambling, no point.
What about 2001 a space odyssey. In 2001 there is no dialog for a painfully long time but it is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. Movies are not suppose to be books with pictures. Books work much better as books. A movie on the other hand has the ability to tell a story visually. A movie made with minimal dialog pushes the limits of the medium in the appropriate direction.
There was a long time when CDs were far cheaper than hard drives. CDRs and CDRWs were around before the 1 GB mark was even reached on hard drives. Do you remember only being able to install a couple of games on your computer and having to run the rest off of the CD?
This is a bad analogy and I doubt you are familiar with the case. A 49 year old woman and her daughter set up a myspace profile of a 16 year old boy, then proceeded to make a 13 year old girl fall in love with the imaginary boy. Two points. First, for a 49 year old it is trivially easy to trick a 13 year old girl to falling in love with a 16 year old boy. Second, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that the victim was 'neurotic' or 'unfit for life', in fact, I think a very large percentage of today's 13 year old girls might do the very same thing.
Unrelated there are a lot of people talking about Lori Drew being prosecuted for unauthorized computer access. If that were the case it would set a bad precedent but she is in fact being charged with the use of information gathered to harass, abuse, or harm someone. Which from my perspective is appropriate. It seems to me litte more than charging someone with harassment.
From an msnbc article
Drew, who has denied creating the account or sending messages to Megan, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.
Prosecutors argue that to access MySpace's servers, Drew first had to sign up for the service, which meant providing her name and date of birth and agreeing to abide by the site's terms of service. Those terms bar false registration information, solicitation of personal information from anyone under 18 and use of any information gathered from the Web site to "harass, abuse, or harm another person."
emphasis added
I also dont think slashdotters should be in such a frenzy about this issue. At the end of the day a woman who did something which most everybody would consider morally wrong is being charged with crimes and faces jail time. Our laws and legal system is broken anyways and I fear well beyond the point of no return, complain about that instead of this.
>>Stuffing the ballot box these days would require cross-party cooperation by observers and counters. Pretty unlikely, IMHO.
When the presidential election keeps coming down to one state or one district it doesnt take many extra votes to win the whole election. Also, I dont really know how the hand counting works on paper ballots. From what I have seen on TV it looks like a group of people just counting and tallying. If you are a supporter of one side or the other I think that it would be pretty easy to pad the vote a little for your candidate. There is also all the absentee ballots from the armed services. Im sure that those could also be intercepted and tampered with quite easily. Furthermore, as the votes get tallied control of the data shifts from many districts up to just a few people.
Lets say for example(and I'm not saying this is how it went, or that this is what I believe), that with the Florida recount and 02 Jeb Bush's strategy was to simply delay the recount long enough for Al Gore to concede. If that was his strategy then it worked and is an example of one man swaying the whole presidential election. Of course the election had to be reasonably close, which it was, as they all are.
It is completely imperative for every citizen of the world to not trust its government or voting processes. If we just put blind trust in a system, designed by humans, which by definition is imperfect, we are inviting those who would do anything for power and money to game the system for their own advancement.
>>Sounds like poor web site design. You always cater to your lowest common denominator, which is dial-up.
i wish you to design the whole internets for me. I am clearly the lowest common denominator. I look forward to being able to quickly browse your sites on my 200 baud modem
Are you still the same person after you get a haircut, tattoo, piercing, lobotomy(too far?)? My point is that every major technology, especially technologies that gain widespread acceptance are constantly being modified or used for other purposes than originally intended. Was electricity originally intended to power telephones, dishwashers, mars rovers? No,no, and no. At the inception of any new technology the best its creator or the general public can wish for is that the technology is used in creative and novel ways.
Aside from that, although the editing and creation aspect of wikipedia relies on technologies which may not be considered the web, the viewing of wikipedia is almost the definition of the original web(all indexed static pages). Wikipedia alone I think is enough to maintain the original web structure to the age of 50 before replacement.
Not that any of this is particularly meaningful, since the article summary is, 'Is the web still the web' and the article title itself is, 'do new web tools spell doom for the browser'
if they are designed to "hit" our reward reinforcement centers they are designed to be addictive not enjoyable. Rats will choose reward pathway stimulation over food to nearly the point of starvation.
I think it interesting that whenever there are articles on slashdot about advertising, which also aims to stimulate peoples rr pathways, everyone cant say enough about how insidious and unethical they are. Also how people should be able to make informed decisions about the products that they buy without being unduly influenced by Madison Avenue. And, conversely when video games are the topic suddenly it is everyones opinion that people are completely in charge of their relationships with video games.
In other words, they are designed to be consistently enjoyable. I could say the same thing about sunny beaches, and yet not everyone goes giving up their lives to become beach bums. The difference here is that one is artificial and one is natural. The beach wasn't designed by humans to make money. Our rewards centers exist, presumably, so that we do behaviors more often that will allow us to survive(i.e. sex eating drinking relaxing). Going to the beach helps us to relax and is therefore beneficial. Video games often don't do anything but entice us to play more video games.
P.S I play video games to but I feel it is important to understand their addictive potential
You can have capitalism without encouraging people to spend more than they have on crap they don't need.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there.
A lot of people who spend there lives trying to explain why capitalism is unjust would disagree with. Nathan Sayre, a professor of geography at UC Berkeley, talks about how when capitalism goes into full swing, after it has passed the Marxian threshold of labor being bought at exchange value and sold for use value, producers drive consumption and consumers don't have a significant impact on the demand part of the supply and demand ratio. The argument goes that a factory loses money every minute that it is not operating at full capacity. If you can run at full capacity by stretching the truth in your advertising or using some other underhanded tactic, you will.
That is just one of the many soul devouring ethical conundrums brought on by capitalism. Under capitalism, in the conflict between altruism and money, the latter road is taken and to varying levels rationalized into the former.
I'm not saying that capitalism is the worst system ever created, nor am I saying that the only people profiting from overly aggressive advertising are rich fat-cats. Think about it if companies like Mattel(who i believe sells bratz) went out of business and other companies that sold similarly useless crap, people would lose jobs and a lack of confidence in economic markets would probably send our economy straight for collapse.
I know that what you will probably think is that, 'companies like Mattel should focus on making toys that build little girls self esteem or make products that cause a significant improvement in the lives of their customers'. I would agree but i think that it is obvious that that is a harder job to do and capitalism clearly doesn't reward the more laborious,time consuming task. 'Time is money' after all.
All the chatter in this thread is making it sound like privatizing education in America would be like running a lemonade stand. That the parents would have to take, say $5000 and pay the school in their area every year in return for an education for their child when this is not the case at all. Most of the better ideas about education now revolve around a voucher system, whereby every adult who pays taxes gets a 'ticket' that is good for one education and they can send their kid to ANY school they want. This concept takes a lot out of the "poor people will get screwed" arguement.
from wikipedia:
"Those who favor education vouchers, like Benny Cook, argue that parents should be able to choose which school their children will attend, and that the government should provide parents with funds they can spend at that school. Proponents assert that implementing a voucher system would promote "free market" competition among schools of all types, which would provide schools incentive to improve. Successful schools would attract students, while bad schools would be forced to reform or close. The goal of this system is to localize accountability as opposed to relying on government standards. Proponents also note that school vouchers would allow for greater economic diversity by offering lower income students opportunities to attend previously uanffordable private schools. School voucher proponent Milton Friedman observed that the poor have an incentive to support school choice, as their children attend substandard schools, and would thus benefit most from alternative schools."
In other countries semi-private education does spendidly. I was watching a Dateline and they showed a classroom from Belgium I think and let me tell you those kids own us they all speak 2-4 languages are polite dont seem to be concerned with the whole clique mentality that plagues American schools and they have a sort of voucher system there. They have a good system and it works. Instead of being our arrogant selves in America we should look for a system that works and copy it. We dont have to come up with every idea first.
Clearly our education system is broken we by far have one of the WORST education systems in the developed world. I personally beleive this is because we have let teacher's unions call all the shots with our education. Check out Stone Phillips book "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity" for the three page chart on the steps required to fire an underperforming teacher. I beleive I saw a story on Dateline about a teacher that admitted to sending sexually explicit emails to a 16 year old and the school board couldnt fire him because of the unions. This type of situation is about the most anti-freemarket anti-democratic system you could have. Anyways I'll leave you now with some sad stats that should really be dealt with in the next decade.
"The United States ranks 24th out of 29 surveyed countries in the reading and science literacy as well as mathematical abilities of its high school students when compared with other developed nations.[88] The United States also has a low literacy rate compared to other developed countries, with a reading literacy rate at 86 - 98% of the population over age 15" -wikipedia
P.S. If the education system was privatized my grammar would probably be better.
Slashdot Mirror
??? if you cast away every problem, then what problems could you possibly have. Im using this argument for everything from now on. Sure Mr Employer, my foul stench, poor punctuality, massive debt and severe chemical dependence issues may make me a poor candidate for this job. But, if we cast all that aside can you make one good argument that i am not the most qualified? Give me money... I'm jonesing
http://www.obesityinamerica.org/trends.html
America as a country is certainly fat. We are probably better than everyone else to, but my time is too valuable to look up another chart for you jealous foreigners.
"The sad truth is you'd rather follow the school into the net,because swimming alone at sea is not the kind of freedom you actually want" -nofx
Slashdot really needs a +1 whoosh and -1 whoosh.
Thank you for this post. I have a lot to say on this issue, but I am much too tired to get involved. Evidence to bias https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ -check it out.
HpLaserJet 4 works on almost everything. Through XP at least.
Fix your sig. It's 'than' not 'then'.
Wouldn't that generate better PR than using a deadbeat comedian?
i didn't know Jerry Seinfeld continually failed to meet his financial obligations.
Take off your blinders. Call a spade a spade, the [any govt.] is run by a bunch of criminals
thats better
People working full time on saving the world still have to eat
Except that she has already grossed at least 216000$ from this invention. Thats 65653.495440729483282674772036474 Big Macs(tm) in NYC.
I was waiting to see if anyone would bring this up. Assuming(perhaps wrongly), that she has full creative control of her project then the decision to patent can only hurt its widespread adoption. If you have one company attempting to squeeze every last penny out of an invention that has a potential to greatly improve the quality of life for a great many, you will end up with a technology that only helps a few, namely the executives of said company.
Of course i must concede that she deserves compensation for her work. But, I argue she has already received much more than adequate compensation. In this article alone it says she has received 216,000$. And if 216,000$ is not in her mind enough for her achievement she can continue to give paid speeches. Also, if she started a non-profit and gave it away she would deeply admired and respected and everyone in the world would want to give her a million hugs. She could then ride that publicity/adoration into more ambitious projects that make her more money and help more people. That would be altruistic. She is not.
P.S. If anyone could give me an example of large scale altruism in a capitalistic society in a situation where the altruist loses something substantial in the actions commission I would greatly appreciate it.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. -Declaration of Independence
Isn't it a bit presumptuous to think the human race will still exist in the year 100000?
to many writers use dialog in movies as a crutch and therefor don't take full advantage of the medium. Its a shame really. Putting the story together for yourself gives you an engaging, active role in the stories development. I find this much more satisfying than having everything spelled out for me. 90% of communication is noverbal and this generally translates terribly to the screen. Clearly im rambling, no point.
What about 2001 a space odyssey. In 2001 there is no dialog for a painfully long time but it is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. Movies are not suppose to be books with pictures. Books work much better as books. A movie on the other hand has the ability to tell a story visually. A movie made with minimal dialog pushes the limits of the medium in the appropriate direction.
Probably hasn't figured out how to commodify the technique.
there fixed
There was a long time when CDs were far cheaper than hard drives. CDRs and CDRWs were around before the 1 GB mark was even reached on hard drives. Do you remember only being able to install a couple of games on your computer and having to run the rest off of the CD?
This is a bad analogy and I doubt you are familiar with the case. A 49 year old woman and her daughter set up a myspace profile of a 16 year old boy, then proceeded to make a 13 year old girl fall in love with the imaginary boy. Two points. First, for a 49 year old it is trivially easy to trick a 13 year old girl to falling in love with a 16 year old boy. Second, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that the victim was 'neurotic' or 'unfit for life', in fact, I think a very large percentage of today's 13 year old girls might do the very same thing.
Unrelated there are a lot of people talking about Lori Drew being prosecuted for unauthorized computer access. If that were the case it would set a bad precedent but she is in fact being charged with the use of information gathered to harass, abuse, or harm someone. Which from my perspective is appropriate. It seems to me litte more than charging someone with harassment.
From an msnbc article
Drew, who has denied creating the account or sending messages to Megan, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.
Prosecutors argue that to access MySpace's servers, Drew first had to sign up for the service, which meant providing her name and date of birth and agreeing to abide by the site's terms of service. Those terms bar false registration information, solicitation of personal information from anyone under 18 and use of any information gathered from the Web site to "harass, abuse, or harm another person."
emphasis added
I also dont think slashdotters should be in such a frenzy about this issue. At the end of the day a woman who did something which most everybody would consider morally wrong is being charged with crimes and faces jail time. Our laws and legal system is broken anyways and I fear well beyond the point of no return, complain about that instead of this.
>>Stuffing the ballot box these days would require cross-party cooperation by observers and counters. Pretty unlikely, IMHO.
When the presidential election keeps coming down to one state or one district it doesnt take many extra votes to win the whole election. Also, I dont really know how the hand counting works on paper ballots. From what I have seen on TV it looks like a group of people just counting and tallying. If you are a supporter of one side or the other I think that it would be pretty easy to pad the vote a little for your candidate. There is also all the absentee ballots from the armed services. Im sure that those could also be intercepted and tampered with quite easily. Furthermore, as the votes get tallied control of the data shifts from many districts up to just a few people.
Lets say for example(and I'm not saying this is how it went, or that this is what I believe), that with the Florida recount and 02 Jeb Bush's strategy was to simply delay the recount long enough for Al Gore to concede. If that was his strategy then it worked and is an example of one man swaying the whole presidential election. Of course the election had to be reasonably close, which it was, as they all are.
It is completely imperative for every citizen of the world to not trust its government or voting processes. If we just put blind trust in a system, designed by humans, which by definition is imperfect, we are inviting those who would do anything for power and money to game the system for their own advancement.
>>Sounds like poor web site design. You always cater to your lowest common denominator, which is dial-up.
i wish you to design the whole internets for me. I am clearly the lowest common denominator. I look forward to being able to quickly browse your sites on my 200 baud modem
>> is the web still the web?
Are you still the same person after you get a haircut, tattoo, piercing, lobotomy(too far?)? My point is that every major technology, especially technologies that gain widespread acceptance are constantly being modified or used for other purposes than originally intended. Was electricity originally intended to power telephones, dishwashers, mars rovers? No,no, and no. At the inception of any new technology the best its creator or the general public can wish for is that the technology is used in creative and novel ways.
Aside from that, although the editing and creation aspect of wikipedia relies on technologies which may not be considered the web, the viewing of wikipedia is almost the definition of the original web(all indexed static pages). Wikipedia alone I think is enough to maintain the original web structure to the age of 50 before replacement.
Not that any of this is particularly meaningful, since the article summary is, 'Is the web still the web' and the article title itself is, 'do new web tools spell doom for the browser'
on the other hand anecdotes + conjecture == causation.
A lot of people who spend there lives trying to explain why capitalism is unjust would disagree with. Nathan Sayre, a professor of geography at UC Berkeley, talks about how when capitalism goes into full swing, after it has passed the Marxian threshold of labor being bought at exchange value and sold for use value, producers drive consumption and consumers don't have a significant impact on the demand part of the supply and demand ratio. The argument goes that a factory loses money every minute that it is not operating at full capacity. If you can run at full capacity by stretching the truth in your advertising or using some other underhanded tactic, you will.
That is just one of the many soul devouring ethical conundrums brought on by capitalism. Under capitalism, in the conflict between altruism and money, the latter road is taken and to varying levels rationalized into the former.
I'm not saying that capitalism is the worst system ever created, nor am I saying that the only people profiting from overly aggressive advertising are rich fat-cats. Think about it if companies like Mattel(who i believe sells bratz) went out of business and other companies that sold similarly useless crap, people would lose jobs and a lack of confidence in economic markets would probably send our economy straight for collapse.
I know that what you will probably think is that, 'companies like Mattel should focus on making toys that build little girls self esteem or make products that cause a significant improvement in the lives of their customers'. I would agree but i think that it is obvious that that is a harder job to do and capitalism clearly doesn't reward the more laborious,time consuming task. 'Time is money' after all.
All the chatter in this thread is making it sound like privatizing education in America would be like running a lemonade stand. That the parents would have to take, say $5000 and pay the school in their area every year in return for an education for their child when this is not the case at all. Most of the better ideas about education now revolve around a voucher system, whereby every adult who pays taxes gets a 'ticket' that is good for one education and they can send their kid to ANY school they want. This concept takes a lot out of the "poor people will get screwed" arguement.
from wikipedia:
"Those who favor education vouchers, like Benny Cook, argue that parents should be able to choose which school their children will attend, and that the government should provide parents with funds they can spend at that school. Proponents assert that implementing a voucher system would promote "free market" competition among schools of all types, which would provide schools incentive to improve. Successful schools would attract students, while bad schools would be forced to reform or close. The goal of this system is to localize accountability as opposed to relying on government standards. Proponents also note that school vouchers would allow for greater economic diversity by offering lower income students opportunities to attend previously uanffordable private schools. School voucher proponent Milton Friedman observed that the poor have an incentive to support school choice, as their children attend substandard schools, and would thus benefit most from alternative schools."
In other countries semi-private education does spendidly. I was watching a Dateline and they showed a classroom from Belgium I think and let me tell you those kids own us they all speak 2-4 languages are polite dont seem to be concerned with the whole clique mentality that plagues American schools and they have a sort of voucher system there. They have a good system and it works. Instead of being our arrogant selves in America we should look for a system that works and copy it. We dont have to come up with every idea first.
Clearly our education system is broken we by far have one of the WORST education systems in the developed world. I personally beleive this is because we have let teacher's unions call all the shots with our education. Check out Stone Phillips book "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity" for the three page chart on the steps required to fire an underperforming teacher. I beleive I saw a story on Dateline about a teacher that admitted to sending sexually explicit emails to a 16 year old and the school board couldnt fire him because of the unions. This type of situation is about the most anti-freemarket anti-democratic system you could have. Anyways I'll leave you now with some sad stats that should really be dealt with in the next decade.
"The United States ranks 24th out of 29 surveyed countries in the reading and science literacy as well as mathematical abilities of its high school students when compared with other developed nations.[88] The United States also has a low literacy rate compared to other developed countries, with a reading literacy rate at 86 - 98% of the population over age 15" -wikipedia
P.S. If the education system was privatized my grammar would probably be better.