I guess this is the start of another Republican witch hunt...This is not some outrageous sweetheart deal. My wife and sister each got mortgages at below the interest rates cited in the article around that same time. My wife was unemployed at the time and my sister was self-employed, working from home at the time. They both had (and still have) excellent credit.
This is much much ado about nothing at all.
Of course, that won't stop the Republicans, who like a good witch hunt.
Nope. That's what I thought, too. I know he "likes" "little people", and all kinds of strange visions were dancing through my head.
Not sugar plums, either.
Keeping in mind that Wikipedia is not a medical reference book, and that I am not saying that schizophrenia and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) are synonymous, but that DID is a particular kind of schizophrenia, here is how Wikipedia defines "schizophrenia": "a psychiatric diagnosis that describes a mental illness characterized by impairments in the perception or expression of reality, most commonly manifesting as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions or disorganized speech and thinking in the context of significant social or occupational dysfunction." Let's parse this a bit to see if DID fits this definition:
"characterized by impairments in the perception or expression of reality" - How is thinking one is actually two or more different people and not remembering one or more of these identities or what one did while assuming one or more of these identities not such an impairment?
"paranoid or bizarre delusions" - How is thinking one is actually two or more different people not a bizarre delusion?
And, how could thinking one was two or more dfferent people with different names not result in "significant social or occupational dysfunction"?
Sorry, but it seems to fit the definition to me.
Also, in the Wikipedia article on "Dissociative Identity Disorder" (the actual correct term for multiple personality disorder), note this reference: "Bliss EL (1980). "Multiple personalities. A report of 14 cases with implications for Schizophrenia and hysteria". Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 37 (12): 1388-97"
Note that I also am not a psychiatrist. Nor do I play one on TV. Except when my name is Sybil...
Actually, multiple personality disorder is a form of schizophrenia. So, people who say that those with multiple personality disorder have schizophrenia, they're not wrong, just inexact.
I started hacking and cracking in 1983, way before it was "cool". At the time, according to me and my friends who were much better hackers and crackers than I was (including one Pentagon computer hacker who eventually got caught), cracking is a subform of hacking.
Language evolves and meanings change. Happens every year with lots of words. During the transition, it creates confusion, but then the new meaning takes over and settles in and communication continues. take "hacking", for example. It used to just mean "beating something with a sharp object"...
I'm pretty good at math, but after while I realized something: Math is just a highly structured language used to describe relationships. As such, it is a useful tool. But it's not the only tool. Logic is the true underpinning for math and for devising non-mathematical solutions to a lot of non-mathematical problems, as well. One of the really nice things about both logic and math is that it is essentially impossible to use math or logic to lie. The closest to lying you can come with math or logic is to make false assumptions of one kind or another and then feed them into a mathematical or logical framework to produce some kind of false result.
Math is not so much important for itself, but because it is a tool that can potentially describe is so immense and comprehensive. Languages other than math have similarly immense capacities, too. Some of them are even superior to math in certain situations, if for no other reason than that they are more accessible to more people who don't have a strong math background. This doesn't mean that they are better than math. It means that they may be more *appropriate* than math for certain applications.
I think the same is true about using math in computer science or computer engineering. Math may be capable of getting you where you need to go, but there may be other methods to get essentially the same outcome. Logic, especially, can be very useful, but even intuition, to a certain point and in certain applications, can get you where you need to be faster tan pure math, although you have to "work backwards through the maze" to put it into code. The same applies to the current argument about languages (VB vs. C++, etc.).
This is like two carpenters arguing about whether using a driver or a ratchet is the best. The "right" answer often depends on which side of the wall you're on.
I'm a huge civil libertarian and in fact will be engaging in some ACLU protest activities this week in DC. But this article on Slashdot is really almost to the point of being misleading. Read the original article and guidance document and you'll see that:
1) The guidance doc specifically says it is applicable to people with access to classified info. Not just students (unless they're working on classified info).
2) The guidance doc also goes to some length to say that these signs don't mean someone is a spy, that people should respect each other's privacy and that good judgment needs to exercised when considering whether to report something.
3) These are not being foisted on universities and there is no apparent attempt to try to get universities to enforce these guidelines. This is essentially a "heads up" list of things that often are associated with people who spy.
And remember: these are guidelines for people working on CLASSIFIED info. I HOPE people who work on (legal) classified projects keep an eye out for these kinds of things.
Now if we could only keep the USDOJ from spying on us without any court oversight, I'd feel MUCH better!
I know what you mean, and you're right that this does happen slowly over time with all vesions of Windows (I've been using Windows since v3.1, MS DOS before that and an Apple II before that). But this was sudden and happened within a week after Vista was released. I need to use WIndows because my business shares MS Word and Excel files with many hundreds of customers and reliable interoperability and precise formatting are important to my business.
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I just have to ask the people on this discussion thread: Have you noticed a significant degrading of performance with XP OS and XP Office since Vista became available? Almost immediately after MS released Vista, my PC (which uses XP OS and XP Office) became more unstable, froze more often, started requiring more reboots, etc.
I am an infamous skeptic of claims made both extremes of the spectrum on almost any issue. But much of my skepticism of the people who rail against the widespread consensus that global warming is happening is that manmade causes are one of the primary drivers of climate change are based on two basic factors:
1) No serious scientist questions that increased levels of carbon dioxide will increase the atmosphere's greenhouse effect. This is a well understood scientific principle whose effect has been demonstrated on the earth and on other planets in our solar system. It makes sense to me that pumping ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while simultaneously eliminating the plant life that processes carbon dioxide into oxygen will increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is just common sense. The main legitimate scientific debates center around (a) how much of the increased carbon dioxide levels we have observed are due to natural versus human-made causes; and (b) how much, how quickly and how persistently the change in carbon dioxide levels will affect the global temperature.
2) I have yet to find a legitimate climate scientist who disputes the idea that humans are changing the global climate who is not either funded by the energy or forestry products industries or who does not have a personal ax to grid with the global consensus on climate change. For instance, here are the scientists that have been presented in this forum as opposing the consensus:
Richard Lindzen is on the oil company payroll. He charges them $2,500 per day when he consults for them. His testimony before the U.S. Senate was paid for by Western Fuels and a speech he wrote, entitled 'Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,' was underwritten by OPEC.
Christopher Landsea doesn't question that increasing greenhouse gases are causing global warming, only that they are already contributing to increasing hurricane strength (which truly is being debated by reputable scientists).
Frederick Seitz was last president of the National Academy of Science in 1969, before global warming was even a theory. He was born in 1911, which makes him about 96 years old, so he probably isn't doing much groundbreaking research. He is a gun for hire, who has done research for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (we know how honest THEIR research is!). He also is a founder and board member for the George C. Marshall Institute, which gets its funding from the Exxon Education Foundation, the American Petroleum Institute, among other corporate interests. He is also affiliated with the infamous Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which circulated a completely farcical petition of scientists opposing the thinking behind those who think the earth is warming due to human factors. The petition was circulate din 1998, before much of what is currently known about climate change was measured and understood. Among the "scientists" who signed the petition were "Mickey Mouse", lobbyists for Petroleum Institute who had no scientific background whatsoever, etc.
Timothy Ball heads the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP), which was set up on the initiative of the High Park Group, a Toronto-based lobby organization whose clients include the Canadian Electricity Association and the Canadian Gas Association. The NRSP refuses to reveal who funds directly it. Ball also formerly headed the activist organization Friends of Science, which also refuses to reveal where it gets its funding. Both organizations have been criticized as being controlled by energy industry lobbyists.
Find me a real, honest skeptic of global warming or stop circulating these hired gun jokers' arguments!
Actually, this is not at all how this is done anymore. While it still isn't perfect, it's much more scientific and accurate than what the quote suggests.
Also, I think that quote is actually much older than you indicated in your post. I seem to recall a very similar quote attributed to a someone from the 1600's that was posted outside the economics department where I went to grad school.
I hate to burst people's bubbles...except when the bubble is as patently stupid as thinking that someone can get something for nothing. Nothing, not even love, is totally free. Love, real love, requires effort on the part of the people in love to make it work. Real love is one of the best bargains on the planet, but it still requires effort, so it isn't free. It may not costs money, at least not in a direct sense, but it costs effort.
The basic argument in the TechDirt article is that, since other, "free", non-DRM music exists, then no business model involving DRM can add value to society ("economic value"), which, in the long term, is necessary for a successful business model. While adding some kind of value is necessary for the long term success of a business model, to say that such a model cannot utilize DRM is patently false. Aside from some currently existing successful business models that ARE using DRM (iTunes, etc.), the argument rests on a basic misunderstanding of what economic value means in the context of DRM.
The cost of distributing digital content, including music, has dropped to truly tiny amounts. The actual cost of delivering a digital version of a song is very small, probably in the vicinity of a few cents per song (don't quote me on that figure). At this point, most of the cost is not the delivery of the song itself, but the time cost to the listeners to find music that matches their tastes. Ironically, this has always been the case.
There has always been "free" music. In the distant past, most music that people listened to was "free", in the sense that they weren't charged for it. People sang and played instruments in their homes for friends and family and no one paid a dime for these performances. The quality was highly variable, depending on who the musicians and singers were, but that's "free" for you.
The music labels aren't using DRM very well, in my opinion, and, given their track record of clubbing people to death for stealing something that has a marginal cost of a few cents, they aren't likely to be the ones to figure out how to include DRM in a successful business model.
The primary problems with reasoning of the author of the TechDirt article and the people that bought into its logic, are.
1) They assume that, since the *marginal* cost of delivering a song to a listener over the Internet is very small, the value of that product is very small. I think someone took a microeconomics course and didn't quite "get it" as it applies to the real world. Some microeconomic theory suggests that, in a truly competitive market, with "perfect information" (an economic term that means everyone knows all pertinent information about a product and its viable alternatives), marginal price will approach the marginal cost. The author and his fans seem to interpret this as meaning that the value of that song is therefore so close to zero (free) that the difference is negligible.
Actually, value is what someone would be willing to pay for something. Usually, a consumer pays less than the absolute maximum they would be willing to pay for something, so that, when they do buy something they come out "ahead", in the sense that their overall welfare (what economists call "utility") is increased, since they traded something (some amount of money) for something they valued more than that money and the other things they might buy with that money. If they weren't getting something better, they probably wouldn't make the trade, unless they were an addict or somesuch. Similarly, companies cannot for long sell something for less than what it costs them to produce it, unless selling it enables them to make money some other way, such as what Google does with its advertising.
2) The second basic problem with the logic of the TechDirt article is that it assumes that the alternative to any business model that uses DRM is "free". It's not. Nothing is free (see above). If a business model can use DRM to capture enough revenue to create
Another key factor that is hard to reproduce is the understanding of the market's needs. While I think this might be reproducible in other parts of the U.S. (Austin, for example, where I used to live...great city!), and some other countries (Japan and a few others come to mind), most non-U.S. cultures just don't have the modern market-consciousness of American society. That's really key, because the reason most companies fail is either 1) the lack of a market; 2) the lack of marketing know-how or 3) lack of funds (already discussed elsewhere in this thread).
As with most human behavioral and economic phenomena, it is the complex mix of definable and indefinable factors that make the magic!
I work for myself from home for a small survey design and analysis firm I started...No, we're not the annoying surveyors that call you at dinner. We conduct surveys on behalf of trade associations and profesional societies. We contact their members to try to find out what they want out of their association (to which they pay dues) and other information that is of interest to the association and its members. We also always offer a way for those who receive our emails to opt out of future follow-up efforts (and we honor these requests). Only about 1% ask to be removed from these follow up efforts. A significant number of these members use AOL. This could significantly affect my business and the ability of professional societies to find out what their dues-paying members want from the organization. I agree that this is a mask for generating additional revenue for AOL and will actually REDUCE the limited usefulness of an over-priced AOL account. Maybe this will be a nail in the coffin of the AOL dinosaur...
Slashdot Mirror
I guess this is the start of another Republican witch hunt...This is not some outrageous sweetheart deal. My wife and sister each got mortgages at below the interest rates cited in the article around that same time. My wife was unemployed at the time and my sister was self-employed, working from home at the time. They both had (and still have) excellent credit.
This is much much ado about nothing at all.
Of course, that won't stop the Republicans, who like a good witch hunt.
Nope. That's what I thought, too. I know he "likes" "little people", and all kinds of strange visions were dancing through my head. Not sugar plums, either.
Keeping in mind that Wikipedia is not a medical reference book, and that I am not saying that schizophrenia and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) are synonymous, but that DID is a particular kind of schizophrenia, here is how Wikipedia defines "schizophrenia": "a psychiatric diagnosis that describes a mental illness characterized by impairments in the perception or expression of reality, most commonly manifesting as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions or disorganized speech and thinking in the context of significant social or occupational dysfunction." Let's parse this a bit to see if DID fits this definition: "characterized by impairments in the perception or expression of reality" - How is thinking one is actually two or more different people and not remembering one or more of these identities or what one did while assuming one or more of these identities not such an impairment? "paranoid or bizarre delusions" - How is thinking one is actually two or more different people not a bizarre delusion? And, how could thinking one was two or more dfferent people with different names not result in "significant social or occupational dysfunction"? Sorry, but it seems to fit the definition to me. Also, in the Wikipedia article on "Dissociative Identity Disorder" (the actual correct term for multiple personality disorder), note this reference: "Bliss EL (1980). "Multiple personalities. A report of 14 cases with implications for Schizophrenia and hysteria". Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 37 (12): 1388-97" Note that I also am not a psychiatrist. Nor do I play one on TV. Except when my name is Sybil...
Actually, multiple personality disorder is a form of schizophrenia. So, people who say that those with multiple personality disorder have schizophrenia, they're not wrong, just inexact.
I started hacking and cracking in 1983, way before it was "cool". At the time, according to me and my friends who were much better hackers and crackers than I was (including one Pentagon computer hacker who eventually got caught), cracking is a subform of hacking.
Language evolves and meanings change. Happens every year with lots of words. During the transition, it creates confusion, but then the new meaning takes over and settles in and communication continues. take "hacking", for example. It used to just mean "beating something with a sharp object"...
I'm pretty good at math, but after while I realized something: Math is just a highly structured language used to describe relationships. As such, it is a useful tool. But it's not the only tool. Logic is the true underpinning for math and for devising non-mathematical solutions to a lot of non-mathematical problems, as well. One of the really nice things about both logic and math is that it is essentially impossible to use math or logic to lie. The closest to lying you can come with math or logic is to make false assumptions of one kind or another and then feed them into a mathematical or logical framework to produce some kind of false result.
Math is not so much important for itself, but because it is a tool that can potentially describe is so immense and comprehensive. Languages other than math have similarly immense capacities, too. Some of them are even superior to math in certain situations, if for no other reason than that they are more accessible to more people who don't have a strong math background. This doesn't mean that they are better than math. It means that they may be more *appropriate* than math for certain applications.
I think the same is true about using math in computer science or computer engineering. Math may be capable of getting you where you need to go, but there may be other methods to get essentially the same outcome. Logic, especially, can be very useful, but even intuition, to a certain point and in certain applications, can get you where you need to be faster tan pure math, although you have to "work backwards through the maze" to put it into code. The same applies to the current argument about languages (VB vs. C++, etc.).
This is like two carpenters arguing about whether using a driver or a ratchet is the best. The "right" answer often depends on which side of the wall you're on.
I'm a huge civil libertarian and in fact will be engaging in some ACLU protest activities this week in DC. But this article on Slashdot is really almost to the point of being misleading. Read the original article and guidance document and you'll see that:
1) The guidance doc specifically says it is applicable to people with access to classified info. Not just students (unless they're working on classified info).
2) The guidance doc also goes to some length to say that these signs don't mean someone is a spy, that people should respect each other's privacy and that good judgment needs to exercised when considering whether to report something.
3) These are not being foisted on universities and there is no apparent attempt to try to get universities to enforce these guidelines. This is essentially a "heads up" list of things that often are associated with people who spy.
And remember: these are guidelines for people working on CLASSIFIED info. I HOPE people who work on (legal) classified projects keep an eye out for these kinds of things.
Now if we could only keep the USDOJ from spying on us without any court oversight, I'd feel MUCH better!
Orwell would be proud!
My question is the timing. It just seems so fortunate for MS...and it's only MS products that are engaging in this behavior.
I know what you mean, and you're right that this does happen slowly over time with all vesions of Windows (I've been using Windows since v3.1, MS DOS before that and an Apple II before that). But this was sudden and happened within a week after Vista was released. I need to use WIndows because my business shares MS Word and Excel files with many hundreds of customers and reliable interoperability and precise formatting are important to my business.
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I just have to ask the people on this discussion thread: Have you noticed a significant degrading of performance with XP OS and XP Office since Vista became available? Almost immediately after MS released Vista, my PC (which uses XP OS and XP Office) became more unstable, froze more often, started requiring more reboots, etc.
Is this just me or has anyone else noticed this?
I am an infamous skeptic of claims made both extremes of the spectrum on almost any issue. But much of my skepticism of the people who rail against the widespread consensus that global warming is happening is that manmade causes are one of the primary drivers of climate change are based on two basic factors:
1) No serious scientist questions that increased levels of carbon dioxide will increase the atmosphere's greenhouse effect. This is a well understood scientific principle whose effect has been demonstrated on the earth and on other planets in our solar system. It makes sense to me that pumping ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while simultaneously eliminating the plant life that processes carbon dioxide into oxygen will increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is just common sense. The main legitimate scientific debates center around (a) how much of the increased carbon dioxide levels we have observed are due to natural versus human-made causes; and (b) how much, how quickly and how persistently the change in carbon dioxide levels will affect the global temperature.
2) I have yet to find a legitimate climate scientist who disputes the idea that humans are changing the global climate who is not either funded by the energy or forestry products industries or who does not have a personal ax to grid with the global consensus on climate change. For instance, here are the scientists that have been presented in this forum as opposing the consensus:
Richard Lindzen is on the oil company payroll. He charges them $2,500 per day when he consults for them. His testimony before the U.S. Senate was paid for by Western Fuels and a speech he wrote, entitled 'Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,' was underwritten by OPEC.
Christopher Landsea doesn't question that increasing greenhouse gases are causing global warming, only that they are already contributing to increasing hurricane strength (which truly is being debated by reputable scientists).
Frederick Seitz was last president of the National Academy of Science in 1969, before global warming was even a theory. He was born in 1911, which makes him about 96 years old, so he probably isn't doing much groundbreaking research. He is a gun for hire, who has done research for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (we know how honest THEIR research is!). He also is a founder and board member for the George C. Marshall Institute, which gets its funding from the Exxon Education Foundation, the American Petroleum Institute, among other corporate interests. He is also affiliated with the infamous Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which circulated a completely farcical petition of scientists opposing the thinking behind those who think the earth is warming due to human factors. The petition was circulate din 1998, before much of what is currently known about climate change was measured and understood. Among the "scientists" who signed the petition were "Mickey Mouse", lobbyists for Petroleum Institute who had no scientific background whatsoever, etc.
Timothy Ball heads the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP), which was set up on the initiative of the High Park Group, a Toronto-based lobby organization whose clients include the Canadian Electricity Association and the Canadian Gas Association. The NRSP refuses to reveal who funds directly it. Ball also formerly headed the activist organization Friends of Science, which also refuses to reveal where it gets its funding. Both organizations have been criticized as being controlled by energy industry lobbyists.
Find me a real, honest skeptic of global warming or stop circulating these hired gun jokers' arguments!
Actually, this is not at all how this is done anymore. While it still isn't perfect, it's much more scientific and accurate than what the quote suggests. Also, I think that quote is actually much older than you indicated in your post. I seem to recall a very similar quote attributed to a someone from the 1600's that was posted outside the economics department where I went to grad school.
I hate to burst people's bubbles...except when the bubble is as patently stupid as thinking that someone can get something for nothing. Nothing, not even love, is totally free. Love, real love, requires effort on the part of the people in love to make it work. Real love is one of the best bargains on the planet, but it still requires effort, so it isn't free. It may not costs money, at least not in a direct sense, but it costs effort.
The basic argument in the TechDirt article is that, since other, "free", non-DRM music exists, then no business model involving DRM can add value to society ("economic value"), which, in the long term, is necessary for a successful business model. While adding some kind of value is necessary for the long term success of a business model, to say that such a model cannot utilize DRM is patently false. Aside from some currently existing successful business models that ARE using DRM (iTunes, etc.), the argument rests on a basic misunderstanding of what economic value means in the context of DRM.
The cost of distributing digital content, including music, has dropped to truly tiny amounts. The actual cost of delivering a digital version of a song is very small, probably in the vicinity of a few cents per song (don't quote me on that figure). At this point, most of the cost is not the delivery of the song itself, but the time cost to the listeners to find music that matches their tastes. Ironically, this has always been the case.
There has always been "free" music. In the distant past, most music that people listened to was "free", in the sense that they weren't charged for it. People sang and played instruments in their homes for friends and family and no one paid a dime for these performances. The quality was highly variable, depending on who the musicians and singers were, but that's "free" for you.
The music labels aren't using DRM very well, in my opinion, and, given their track record of clubbing people to death for stealing something that has a marginal cost of a few cents, they aren't likely to be the ones to figure out how to include DRM in a successful business model.
The primary problems with reasoning of the author of the TechDirt article and the people that bought into its logic, are.
1) They assume that, since the *marginal* cost of delivering a song to a listener over the Internet is very small, the value of that product is very small. I think someone took a microeconomics course and didn't quite "get it" as it applies to the real world. Some microeconomic theory suggests that, in a truly competitive market, with "perfect information" (an economic term that means everyone knows all pertinent information about a product and its viable alternatives), marginal price will approach the marginal cost. The author and his fans seem to interpret this as meaning that the value of that song is therefore so close to zero (free) that the difference is negligible.
Actually, value is what someone would be willing to pay for something. Usually, a consumer pays less than the absolute maximum they would be willing to pay for something, so that, when they do buy something they come out "ahead", in the sense that their overall welfare (what economists call "utility") is increased, since they traded something (some amount of money) for something they valued more than that money and the other things they might buy with that money. If they weren't getting something better, they probably wouldn't make the trade, unless they were an addict or somesuch. Similarly, companies cannot for long sell something for less than what it costs them to produce it, unless selling it enables them to make money some other way, such as what Google does with its advertising.
2) The second basic problem with the logic of the TechDirt article is that it assumes that the alternative to any business model that uses DRM is "free". It's not. Nothing is free (see above). If a business model can use DRM to capture enough revenue to create
As with most human behavioral and economic phenomena, it is the complex mix of definable and indefinable factors that make the magic!
I work for myself from home for a small survey design and analysis firm I started...No, we're not the annoying surveyors that call you at dinner. We conduct surveys on behalf of trade associations and profesional societies. We contact their members to try to find out what they want out of their association (to which they pay dues) and other information that is of interest to the association and its members. We also always offer a way for those who receive our emails to opt out of future follow-up efforts (and we honor these requests). Only about 1% ask to be removed from these follow up efforts. A significant number of these members use AOL. This could significantly affect my business and the ability of professional societies to find out what their dues-paying members want from the organization. I agree that this is a mask for generating additional revenue for AOL and will actually REDUCE the limited usefulness of an over-priced AOL account. Maybe this will be a nail in the coffin of the AOL dinosaur...