Porn is a trap - it feeds the pleasure centers of the brain, devalues the humanity of the person being used for that pleasure,
I suspect the truth is that you devalue the humanity of people who take part in pornography.
Real relationships are not self-focused
You really are very confused aren't you? You'd have to be to confuse masturbating while looking at pornography with "real relationships". I'm sure most people are under no such illusions.
Impaired? A bit. But nothing like what you're suggesting. I've just come from a hard workout at the gym and I'm looking forward to a good long run at the weekend in readiness for Bay to Breakers across San Francisco in a month or two. I'm the fittest I've been in my life. No, I want to give up food because of this damned irritable bowel that often flares up after I eat.
Yeah, I tried giving it up too. But no matter how hard I tried I always find myself going back to eating again. There's obviously a big media cover up. I suspect that at least 90% of the people I know eat food and can't give it up. But do you ever read news stories about how addictive it is?
Your lesbian stereotype is a concept some men came up with to comfort themselves.
Exactly. And the majority of women have never been able to understand how the majority of men can get such pleasure from images of naked women (and men) and console themselves with fantasies of how these men must have something fundamentally missing from their lives.
Your point about addiction in general is taken however.
So why shouldn't they think that an email on Citibank "stationery" (logos, etc.) claiming to be "From: security@citibank.com" isn't really from Citibank?
Why indeed? Anyone can print out Citibank letterhead and if you unscrupulously sent fradulous letters like that many people would be fooled. The main reason we don't see this kind of fraud is that the return rate is probably quite low so you need to spend a large sum of money on your fraudulent mailing. It also takes longer to implement such a fraud: you'd have to wait days for your letters to be turned around rather than the seconds required to capture passwords on a phishing web site.
My wife doesn't know anything about email technology except how to compose a mail to a specific address and how to reply. I pointed out to her a whole bunch of issues that have nothing to do with understanding technology: that there are millions of people out there who are prepared to try to rip her off, that anyone can send any email they like to anyone, that there are people who would like her password and so on. She has done an amazing job of avoiding spam and phishing attacks. Unfortunately, only two days ago, she was caught out for the first time and 'confirmed' that she wanted to be removed from a mailing list - the confirmation actually being a confirmation that the phish had been delivered. But she realised she had made a mistake immediately. Her reasoning that allowed her to draw this conclusion had nothing to do with understanding the technology, it was a result of understanding the kinds of psychological tricks that one person might use to rip off another.
In fact, I think it's harmful to blame phishing on people's lack of understanding of technology. Explain that technology to them and their eyes wil glaze over and ignore the advice. But point out some basic sociological facts and they are more interested. Armed with those facts they can use the ordinary everyday logic they use to decide whether or not to open the front door to a stranger when deciding whether or not to respond to an email.
Sounds like a typical female sexual fantasy to me. Guys who masturbate are in need of a good woman to fill their lives yada, yada, yada. It's funny how women can get away with this kind of patronising crap. If a guy published a typical male fantasy in an article, like "lesbians are only lesbians because they haven't yet experienced a good shag", it would be considered offensive. But women can get away with it. In fact, that sums up the whole discussion about pornography: men want porn, women don't, but society judges porn to be bad because it is in fact women who determine the ethics of our society.
Yet again, people are in denial. It must be the customer service, it must be because their products get you laid, it must be because Apple is fashionable, it must be because they pump pheromones into the stores. People will make up countless absurd stories to explain why people buy Apple products because they can't face the simple truth that Apple succeeds because they make good products that people want at a price that people will pay.
Reminds me of another similar situation - the endless sociological fictions that people will fabricate in order to explain why more people don't adopt Linux.
...out in the field trying to point his 100ft wide dish at the right quasar while hiding behind a tree so that nobody else can see what he's pointing it at.
I think this should get some kind of award for dumbest invention ever.
Of course technology enables this. But it's not lack of understanding of technology that is the problem. People don't fall for phishing because they don't understand the technology of email. They fall for it because they don't understand the social implications of a technology like email. You could have perfect understanding of how email works and still not appreciate that there are people in this world who are prepared to email millions of phishing mails out. In fact, the people who put together the original RFCs specifying email transport probably fit this category - they knew all of the bits and bytes but failed to appreciate what would happen when millions of ordinary people got their hands on it. In fact, only a small handful of science fiction writers seem to have predicted what would happen.
What does this have to do with understanding technology? If someone comes to the door from a UPS truck wearing a UPS uniform and carrying a package most people are likely to assume this is someone from UPS. It's not an issue of understanding technology at all. The issue is that when someone comes to the door wearing such a uniform we know it's likely to be for real because a con-man, say, would have to invest significant effort into faking the suit and vehicle, and they're also taking a risk because their actions may be visible in public. Anyone can sent a million phishing emails in private. The difference is social, not technological.
Preventing comet strikes would give taxpayers a return on their money...
Eh? It's the precise opposite. Creating a public fear of impacting comets or asteroids sounds like a classic example of a cash cow that would allow NASA to leech money from taxpayers.
I get my MX from zoneedit for which I made a nominal one-time payment and I you can get 1GB from Yahoo for free. Zoneedit forward an unlimited number of email addresses to as many email accounts, on different servers, as you want. The market is full of niches for people with slightly varying requirements - I actually prefer to pay Apple to deliver my email. I don't see anything special about the gmail niche that makes it stand out from the others except for the obvious privacy concerns with gmail.
Why is there a front page slashdot story reviewing a mail service that looks like countless others and has some marginal improvements over services going back years? Sometimes I can't help wondering if one (or all?) of the/. editors is using these largely contentless stories to manipulate stock prices by raising the profile of google, yet again, at opportune moments.
It's interesting to note the bewilderment in the Linux community over why people outside aren't embracing Linux with open arms. They try to find all kinds of explanations: Microsoft FUD, the ignorance of managers, paid shills writing negative comments in the press, and now prejudice about how open source developers dress. Anything but looking at Linux itself. 10 years ago I installed Linux on a PC for the first time in my life and it was an exciting moment. Now, however, I'm forced to use Linux at work. The landscape has changed over the last decade and I have no difficulty understanding why people don't want to adopt Linux without looking to sociology for explanations.
No, no, no! You're missing it completely. The entire universe is in fact running on an incredibly slow simulator. Much slower than the one used to simulate the virus. It's just that you think it's running fast because you're part of the simulation.
This is such a misleading headline. It's a simulation of the dynamics of the proteins forming the outer case of the virus to understand how it maintains its structure. It's purely about studying the structure - like an engineer's finite element simulation of a bridge. It's great work from this point of view. But it's not a simulation of any kind of biological process because the time scale is something like nanoseconds. So yes, it's a simulation, but it's not a simulation of a lifeform qua a lifeform.
And that word 'lifeform' - it brings the quality of the reporting down to the level of Star Trek psychobabble. Try 'organsim', or even 'virus', next time.
The best minds in the world, all of whom have been hire by Google, came up with that new UI. I'm simply blown away by how good it is. It needs to be reported in every single media outlet on the planet because it's so earth shattering. You've really gotta hand it to Google - it makes the efforts of mere mortals look paltry by comparison. I don't know why/. even has news stories about other companies.
But there is another big connection which for some reason is frequently overlooked even though it's known by just about every single theoretical physicist. Briefly it's this: frequently when doing quantum mechanics you find yourself with an infinite series to sum. Unfortunately they often turn out to be divergent series so there is no sum. So physicists cheat and use a technique called zeta regularisation to extract a finite answer. Bizarre as it seems, it sometimes gives physically sensible results. It's just this kind of weird summation that leads to physicists declaring that String Theory only works in 26, 10 or some other dimension (depending on your exact flavour of String Theory.
But for some reason, people don't talk about this as a connection between the zeta function and physics. Even so, any text on String Theory these days is full of statements that were originally understood in the context of number theory (eg, the theory of modular forms) and are closely tied up with the properties of the zeta function.
By strange coincidence I just (30 minutes ago) heard the Dyson story yet again on old podcast from the BBC (the program "In Our Time" on Prime Numbers).
It's a very big surprise. Prime numbers pop up in number theory all the time but we don't expect to see them appear in physics. For the longest time it was unusual to see integers at all in physics - classical mechanics deals with real valued (or vector valued) properties like mass, velocity and force. Classical phenomena that pick out integers are contrived or rare.
With quantum mechanics we start seeing integers. For example the energy levels of a hydrogen atom are proportional to 1/m^2-1/n^2 where m and n are integers. Physicists were completely blown away when they saw integers appearing in this way and this turned physics completely on its head.
Even so, we still don't see much number theory going on in physics. Until recently, number theorists studying primes have had very little overlap with the work of physicists. So to have a physical phenomenon that may be tied up with the properties of prime numbers is actually pretty unexpected and pretty amazing.
But it's not entirely new. I saw seminars on Gutzwiller's work connecting the quantum mechanics of chaotic systems with the Riemann zeta function years ago. And the Riemann zeta function pops up in physics in other contexts from time to time - eg. in the regularisation of various physical models such as in the computation of the Casimir force. Since the appearance of String Theory quite a bit of number theory has started appearing in physics.
Slashdot Mirror
Impaired? A bit. But nothing like what you're suggesting. I've just come from a hard workout at the gym and I'm looking forward to a good long run at the weekend in readiness for Bay to Breakers across San Francisco in a month or two. I'm the fittest I've been in my life. No, I want to give up food because of this damned irritable bowel that often flares up after I eat.
Yeah, I tried giving it up too. But no matter how hard I tried I always find myself going back to eating again. There's obviously a big media cover up. I suspect that at least 90% of the people I know eat food and can't give it up. But do you ever read news stories about how addictive it is?
Your point about addiction in general is taken however.
My wife doesn't know anything about email technology except how to compose a mail to a specific address and how to reply. I pointed out to her a whole bunch of issues that have nothing to do with understanding technology: that there are millions of people out there who are prepared to try to rip her off, that anyone can send any email they like to anyone, that there are people who would like her password and so on. She has done an amazing job of avoiding spam and phishing attacks. Unfortunately, only two days ago, she was caught out for the first time and 'confirmed' that she wanted to be removed from a mailing list - the confirmation actually being a confirmation that the phish had been delivered. But she realised she had made a mistake immediately. Her reasoning that allowed her to draw this conclusion had nothing to do with understanding the technology, it was a result of understanding the kinds of psychological tricks that one person might use to rip off another.
In fact, I think it's harmful to blame phishing on people's lack of understanding of technology. Explain that technology to them and their eyes wil glaze over and ignore the advice. But point out some basic sociological facts and they are more interested. Armed with those facts they can use the ordinary everyday logic they use to decide whether or not to open the front door to a stranger when deciding whether or not to respond to an email.
Yet again, people are in denial. It must be the customer service, it must be because their products get you laid, it must be because Apple is fashionable, it must be because they pump pheromones into the stores. People will make up countless absurd stories to explain why people buy Apple products because they can't face the simple truth that Apple succeeds because they make good products that people want at a price that people will pay.
Reminds me of another similar situation - the endless sociological fictions that people will fabricate in order to explain why more people don't adopt Linux.
Who said anything about using this live? You must be really thick or something.
I think this should get some kind of award for dumbest invention ever.
Of course technology enables this. But it's not lack of understanding of technology that is the problem. People don't fall for phishing because they don't understand the technology of email. They fall for it because they don't understand the social implications of a technology like email. You could have perfect understanding of how email works and still not appreciate that there are people in this world who are prepared to email millions of phishing mails out. In fact, the people who put together the original RFCs specifying email transport probably fit this category - they knew all of the bits and bytes but failed to appreciate what would happen when millions of ordinary people got their hands on it. In fact, only a small handful of science fiction writers seem to have predicted what would happen.
What does this have to do with understanding technology? If someone comes to the door from a UPS truck wearing a UPS uniform and carrying a package most people are likely to assume this is someone from UPS. It's not an issue of understanding technology at all. The issue is that when someone comes to the door wearing such a uniform we know it's likely to be for real because a con-man, say, would have to invest significant effort into faking the suit and vehicle, and they're also taking a risk because their actions may be visible in public. Anyone can sent a million phishing emails in private. The difference is social, not technological.
Eleven!
...the heavy electricity controversy.
I get my MX from zoneedit for which I made a nominal one-time payment and I you can get 1GB from Yahoo for free. Zoneedit forward an unlimited number of email addresses to as many email accounts, on different servers, as you want. The market is full of niches for people with slightly varying requirements - I actually prefer to pay Apple to deliver my email. I don't see anything special about the gmail niche that makes it stand out from the others except for the obvious privacy concerns with gmail.
Why is there a front page slashdot story reviewing a mail service that looks like countless others and has some marginal improvements over services going back years? Sometimes I can't help wondering if one (or all?) of the /. editors is using these largely contentless stories to manipulate stock prices by raising the profile of google, yet again, at opportune moments.
It's interesting to note the bewilderment in the Linux community over why people outside aren't embracing Linux with open arms. They try to find all kinds of explanations: Microsoft FUD, the ignorance of managers, paid shills writing negative comments in the press, and now prejudice about how open source developers dress. Anything but looking at Linux itself. 10 years ago I installed Linux on a PC for the first time in my life and it was an exciting moment. Now, however, I'm forced to use Linux at work. The landscape has changed over the last decade and I have no difficulty understanding why people don't want to adopt Linux without looking to sociology for explanations.
This is slashdot. Nobody here is having sex with anyone.
I've no idea what that is unless you mean a pre-owned watch?
No, no, no! You're missing it completely. The entire universe is in fact running on an incredibly slow simulator. Much slower than the one used to simulate the virus. It's just that you think it's running fast because you're part of the simulation.
What does "help our lives" mean?
And that word 'lifeform' - it brings the quality of the reporting down to the level of Star Trek psychobabble. Try 'organsim', or even 'virus', next time.
The best minds in the world, all of whom have been hire by Google, came up with that new UI. I'm simply blown away by how good it is. It needs to be reported in every single media outlet on the planet because it's so earth shattering. You've really gotta hand it to Google - it makes the efforts of mere mortals look paltry by comparison. I don't know why /. even has news stories about other companies.
But for some reason, people don't talk about this as a connection between the zeta function and physics. Even so, any text on String Theory these days is full of statements that were originally understood in the context of number theory (eg, the theory of modular forms) and are closely tied up with the properties of the zeta function.
By strange coincidence I just (30 minutes ago) heard the Dyson story yet again on old podcast from the BBC (the program "In Our Time" on Prime Numbers).
With quantum mechanics we start seeing integers. For example the energy levels of a hydrogen atom are proportional to 1/m^2-1/n^2 where m and n are integers. Physicists were completely blown away when they saw integers appearing in this way and this turned physics completely on its head.
Even so, we still don't see much number theory going on in physics. Until recently, number theorists studying primes have had very little overlap with the work of physicists. So to have a physical phenomenon that may be tied up with the properties of prime numbers is actually pretty unexpected and pretty amazing.
But it's not entirely new. I saw seminars on Gutzwiller's work connecting the quantum mechanics of chaotic systems with the Riemann zeta function years ago. And the Riemann zeta function pops up in physics in other contexts from time to time - eg. in the regularisation of various physical models such as in the computation of the Casimir force. Since the appearance of String Theory quite a bit of number theory has started appearing in physics.