Paypal's behavious is unacceptable in many ways and it happens to many people.
The most annoying thing is when you couple it to ebay, and anoying buyers file a not-received or not-as-described claim when it's clear they couldn't have received it yet, or you told them it was delayed because you were, say ill. As has happened with me.
The bad thing is that this partly or wholly freezes your business section that depends on that. Unacceptable.
Paypal and Ebay were once pretty good, the former because payments via bank transfer for small amounts internatioanlly were so expensive, but all that is gone now and the fees for large sums are also far too high...
I suggest everyone use bank tranfers in EURO countries. IBAN/BIC payments are free if done with shared-cost.
> You are forced to have the auditors by agreeing to the licenses to use certain software products.
Unless a court has agreed that this is so, your statement is untrue.
What if the contract says you have to give up your first child in case you stop using M$ products? Even if you agree (which you have no option not to do in many cases due to M$ monopoly and other software not being made for other operating systems), this will not be legally binding.
It's like that with lots of clauses in e.g. warranties. There are often lots of provisions and exclusions in warranties that are not legal as they reduce ones rights compared to the standard rights. That's not allowed... (at least in Europe)
Except, the burden of proof is not on the skeptics. It is on those who wish to prove the exception to the rule is, indeed, the rule. If you want people to believe in global warming's existence, you've got to prove it, irrefutably.
Bullshit.
The burden of proof on refuting an accepted theory is on the non-believers who must convince the other scientists (see a book on philosophy of science, this is how science works). Here I use 'other' assuming those non-believers are scientists which they mostly aren't in the case of global warming.
Further: "you've got to prove it, irrefutably" is impossible. Nothing can be proved irrefutably except in mathematics.
That's a lot to fight against. Generations of people are tired of the propagandized rhetoric and general bullshit.
Oh no they aren't, see politics. And as to your argument
Considering the history of climate prediction (lies, 180 degree inaccuracy, etc.), anyone trying to do that has a hard job ahead of them. We've been hearing "we're 10 years from total annihilation due to our abuse of the planet" since my parents were in grade school, and I've got kids of grade school age now, myself. Climatic temperatures were supposed to be 20 degrees hotter now than they are and agriculture will shortly become unsustainable for the population's feeding, according to what I remember being 'taught' when I was in grade school.
I don't know what school you've been in, but it must have been a crap one. I never heard anything about these matters except a mention here and there, no '20 degrees hotter'. There have been people warning about pollution since esp. the 60s (for example the feminization through plastics, medicine that's nowadays a major pollutant in water cleaning installations), also overpopulation, and you know what, all of those predictions were correct. There are severe problems with pollution everywhere, with ever growing rubbish dumps, and gasp, CO2 levels which can cause global warming.
Now the global warming possibility is taken seriously, crackpots like you start claiming all kinds on nonsense.
Tax fuel so people drive less? Great, you just made maintaining one's lifestyle more expensive. (And, in many, many cases, just ruined the livelihood of many others - never mind lifestyle.
You're quite right, why consider the future of the entire planet when all you want to do is make a living, ride around in your hummer, and use up a shitload of fuel several times that used in other countries. I don't blame you, they are obviously nuts!
And your post was raised to +4 insightful? Was there a convention of the dutch liar club "Groene rekenkamer", of the dutch magazine Elesevier who employs crackpot denier Simon Rozendaal?
What I'm waiting for next from you is a post on why there never was an acid rain problem, as the forests didn't die after all (after the sulphur output decreases from factories etc., but never mind that, a GW-denier doesn't like the facts get in the way of good rant).
"would of", "Could of", "should of", etc derive from contractions of the form "would've", "could've", "should've". Those exist only in extremely informal speech, and virtually never in writing of any kind. However it is particularly common in America for children to hear these contractions as two separate words, and they incorporate them into their speech as such. When they go to write it down, they write is as "would of", and they don't see the problem. If they correctly wrote "would've" they might see the issue, and realize that they should write would have. This is not an issue related to spell checking, as this problem long predated spell checking over here in America.
From your surprise about this issue, I'm guessing this is not found in England. My guess is those contractions are never used over there even in really informal speech. Since you are talking about closed captions (American term for subtitles for the hearing impaired, as opposed to translation subtitles) I'm betting the BBC contracted an American company to write the closed captions.
It's something I've not seen before, but I will elaborate, that this is not a problem to do with spell checkers, nor a problem to do with children who don't know how to spell something correctly.
Of course, the contraction isn't even needed, when saying "would have" quickly, it almost sounds the same as "would of". And for some reason this phonetic similarity causes the wrong words to be written down. I've seen in the discussion boards by people from the UK, who I know are around 40 years old, and it really is happening in the last ca. 4 years (in Europe/UK).
So I think it could very well be a UK subtitling company. They were indeed subtitles for hearing impaired. I'm not hearing impaired but I'm dutch and subtitles do help sometimes. I switched them on because of background music in the episode IIRC (one of the women of Torchwood was in disco or whatever).
using technology increases a child's core literary skills. As Researcher Obvious put it, 'The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.' And for those of us worried about a world of 'tl;dr' and 'Y U H8n?'
I don't know about literary skills, but I see an abundance of wrong spellings of words that don't have the right meaning but phonetically are almost the same. An example is 'of' instead of 'have'. E.g. someone may write "he would of done this" instead of "he would have done this". Probably caused by trying to write too fast and not thinking about what they wrote, and that's a phenomenon that I've only seen the last 4 years or so (I think I first spotted this in a subtitle for Torchwood. I almost couldn't believe my eyes, that such a mistake was made by the BBC). If that time estimate is correct for when this sort of thing started, then possibly technology, or probably better the entire lifestyle (fast paced, short attention span, exacerbated by TV's ads that interrupt programs) in the west these days, may be the cause of this.
> Pesticides, too, can perhaps be used in a way that doesn't cause all of those > nasty chemicals to pollute someone else's property. Until it crosses the border > from one person's property to the next, it's OK in my book.
Score 4 insightful? Give me a break!
Where the hell do you think those chemicals end up? They get into the entire ecosystem and thus get into *everyone's* property. *That's* why there are limits on using pesticides and calls to reduce that even further.
Oh yes, and to that anonymous coward:
> from her website, she's generally anti-freedom > > opposes freedom to own "vicious" dog breeds > opposes freedom to use "dangerous pesticides" to kill mosquitoes > opposes freedom to use marijuana
She probably also opposes the freedom to kill people? Ghastly!
> Santa Cruz, California > > also known as the World's Largest Open Air Mental Institution. > P.S. Sorry, but you'll probably only get this if you've actually visited the place.
Except that Santa Cruz is synonymous with crackpot on slashdot due to people with silly names working for SCO.
> Even so, the cream made spinal-cord neural activity linked to pain vanish.
The cream did no such thing, the people's minds did this. It's quite unsurprising that as the brain processes pain (which is just information about damage to tissue), that the brain can also switch it (the processing, i.e. feeling) off.
I can do this whenever I want. First time I did this when I was 12 or so, and for the umpteenth time the lid of the kettle to boil water for tea fell off, and I burnt my hand. Painful and annoying. I said to myself: Enough, no more pain! And gone it was. Not really anything special I believe, see e.g. fakirs.
Of course the 'placebo effect' is more than just turning off pain, it's also about getting better without medicine, i.e. making your body do things to repair itself. This I also do consciously (i.e. I tell myself that my immune system should work harder to kill the 'intruders':)) and may be the reason why I'm almost never ill, and when I am, I recover very quickly (I never go to a doctor).
Reminds me of a Married with children episode btw.:
[ Al ] I feel strong!
{ Peggy says something }
[ Al ] I feel weak...
> The article asserts that Facebook and MySpace themselves are complicit in this, > failing to crack down on the abuses they see because they make so much money from > advertising for the most popular games.
I don't know about this case but I can give information on something quite similar in a very different field.
In Nl there's a website for 2nd hand stuff (that's how it started out anyway) called marktplaats. New stuff is also sold, and there's even a section on meeting people, finding people you lost contact with etc. I didn't notice that until last year, and I read some comments about people being ripped off. This was in the dating section. I thought it might be interesting to have a look see what happened when I sent a message. So, I did, and invariably those messages resulted in replies which asked me to send an SMS to a certain pay number. Which I didn't do because I don't like mobile phones (so I don't even have one...), and why should I? I know many people do like to use mobile phones for message in preference to emails, but something wasn't right. I checked the SMS numbers and it turns out if you send a message a company gets money + the person using that number. There are some legitimate possiblities for this, but all the references were for scams of women asking men (actually, vice versa too sometimes, yes it happens) to SMS, then breaking of contact when the men want to meet or something like that.
So, I examined the structure (use of language) and titles of the contact ads, and more. I concluded that most of the ads were fake.
Some more information:
- The website did remove the relevant ads when I mentioned the SMS stuff
- I mentioned this on the forum section of the website and after that, the number of ads dropped enormously (i.e. others complained about the offending listings).
- No structural solution was implemented even though I suggested and easy one, which was to state on the page for each contact ad, not to use pay-SMS numbers because these are usually from scammers. That should keep replies down to scammers to want you to SMS.
- The website makes money from the scammers as these pay to get the ad back up in front of the lists of ads regularly (so it gets visited more times). This is also of course why they don't take further actions. It also shows what kind of people run this website, they don't care about you.
Please don't say people deserve to ripped off by such scammers. That someone is stupid is not a valid reason for feeling he/she deserves to be ripped off. Assholes deserve to be ripped off, not people who may not be smart. In fact, it's not about being smart, smart people also fall for (confidence) tricks.
> While I believe I understand your point I think you missed mine:
> You have an opportunity, whenever you make a decision on how to acquire > property (and I would classify a song as property that has vested > property rights) - buy or rent.
Aha, I see what you mean (I think!) and this was covered implicitly by what I said in my first post, namely that the songs being played on the radio are already paid for by the radio station, and taxes. it depends a bit on which country you're in, but here in NL, everyone pays taxes to support radio/TV even if you have no one. It used to be such that you were not allowed to use a radio or TV unless you had a licence, same as I believe it still is in the UK. As everyone here in NL pays such taxes, everyone may use/listen to a radio, so why no the radio in the supermarket? Even if not done by taxes, the number of people not paying a licence fee (e.g. in the UK) will be small percentage so still not a case for a store licence. And how the songs are being paid for, in one go or 'rented' doesn't matter, they are being paid for. If the customer didn't listen to the song in the store, he could have listened to it in his car, or at home, legal, paid for.
Now, as the songs are continually being paid for (if not by taxes, then still by the radio stations themselves), why should business-use need further compensation?
The only reason would be as someone else mentioned, to have a specific difference in price between a product used commercialy and non-commercially. For music I can understand that for say a dance-club where people specifically come for the music, that in that case it would be appropriate to need a licence as the club's 'work' depends largely on the music makers work. But not for background music, or anything which is just a small part of the whole. Then my argument applies.
>> Should the builders, paint manufacturers, etc. get 'royalties' because you use their products commercially? >> >> I don't think so.
> Some do, it's called rent. The choice is to either buy everything outright, or pay a fee for it's use on an ongoing basis. You could buy the right sto a song; just as you can a building; or simply pay an ongoing fee for it's use (and the stuff inside) without every owning anything.
No, it's not rent. The issue is not how you pay for the building (and not how you pay for the music), but the purpose for which it's used.
Ditto for the music. It is argued (also in the Netherlands), that commercial use of music adds value to the experience, or makes workers work better. This is a bogus argument as this is true for just about anything. A building is better than open-air, so if you convert your house to a shop (small shops are often houses in the Netherlands), then suddenly you are supposed to pay the builders, the brick manufacturers, the electriciens, etc. extra money each year because you use your house commercially.
Another example: A comfortable chair in an office. If you use it at home, no problem, use it in the office instead of crappy chairs, and bingo, you're supposed to pay the manufacturer, and anyone who helped make it. Absurd!
> Everyone here is going to talk about how outrageous it is for a supermarket > to be charged for playing the radio, but the fact of the matter is that they > use the radio to create a pleasant environment for their customers, which > makes it a tool of commerce.
Yes, and so is the building itself, the paint to make the walls look nice, and much more.
Should the builders, paint manufacturers, etc. get 'royalties' because you use their products commercially?
I don't think so. So "used as a tool of commerce" is just not a valid argument.
Just as with the building/paint/what's in the building, the radio has already been paid for. Via tax (as in NL) and/or the radio stations which pay to transmit. Everyone can freely listen to the radio privately, so why should anyone have to pay to use it in a store?
> Yet the idea that plot was optional caught on and the same flaw > was replicated in other games of the era, such as Quake and > (to a lesser extent) Duke Nukem 3D.
The article appears to only think of games from ca. 1993 on, but I will expand this and include 8 bit home computers in my comments:
Old home computer games invariably had no or a paper thin plot that was described in a manual. Different from Doom? Not at all. Perhaps all early PC games had long introductions or manuals, but not most home computer games. So even if early PC games had good plots, leaving those home computer games out of the comparison is nonsensical as they all influenced each other.
You didn't need to read the manual/instructions in most cases either even for games that had a solid plot. You just dive into it and figure out what's going on later... I did that in 1985 and it still works now. Mostly. For more complex games, e.g. Elite in 1984, reading the manual was both interesting and made the playing more fun. For most games it was moot.
FTA:
> Duke Nukem 3D is a notable turning point from a stylistic point of view, > introducing the idea of a vocal player character with a pre-defined personality in an FPS > - but it's one which has also been outdated since then.
Outdated? No way. Duke 3d is still fun to play, just as Doom is. And both are still a lot of fun in a network. You don't need bleeding edge graphics to enjoy the fun of multiplayer gaming nor to enjoy Duke's commentary...
> "An armed body guard protected him at Harvard Law School when he gave a speech last month."
> So, did he ever get use that gun against the people who terminated him, I wonder?
I wonder more why anyone at Harvard law school would invite, and even listen to him?
Yes, it is of course just part of the wonders of modern society, where a sociopath can keep on messing up society via influential positions he gets via friends (i.e. fellow sociopaths). Isn't it great?
> I have two graphs here. > In the first graph you can see the global warming measured per year. > In the second paragraph you can see the carbondioxide emissions meassured per year.
> Now let's fold these two together, shall we?" And they totally did not match. > Man that guy made my fucking day!
I'm sure he did. He's probably a member of a liar-club called "Groene rekenkamer" or associated with it. Or something. Those are all people who have no clue what reasoning is (even if some have a university degree) and no idea about the facts or to interpret them.
I examined many of their claims/reasonings and found them all to be lies and extremely poor reasonings respectively.
And btw. for your information, of course those graphs don't need to match. There are obvious delays as energy can be used e.g. in extra tree growth (which will come to haunt us later when those trees decay and the limit of extra tree growth caused by higher CO2 levels is reached), and in e.g. acidification of the ocean, absorbtion of energy where it's not directly visible at this moment etc.
> Lockheed will be partnered with [snip] > and - of course - Microsoft > in developing the MNP
What's "of course" about this?
Really, this is no different from managers, company directors etc. who achieve nothing, or even drive companies bankrupt, yet still manage to obtain the next job to fuck up.
What the hell is up with these people?
Oh btw, any story on slashdot that somehow mentions Microsoft should automatically be assigned a non-removable tag: f*ckmicrosoft.
And finally: What's with the (extremely annoying) capitalisation of each word in a headline on Slashdot and many other places? That's bad practice and makes sentences (headlines too) less readable.
> This is of course an implied criticism of former US president George W Bush and the neo-conservatives, > who were often accused of trying to change the world in their image.
This is putting it all wrong as if they had some sort of rational ideal that they strove towards.
In fact, they were (and still are of course) sociopaths who don't give a damn about anyone but themselves.
I knew this about G.W. Bush the first time I saw him. This was the first election, with the counting problems going on and Bush said (paraphrased): "Let me get on, I have a administration to form". Of course, as the votes were close, Gore could have said exactly the same thing so I was disgusted. I became more disgusted when news media (papers, TV) never made any comment about this, which really made me aware of how poor a job journalists do.
In general, such reversible non-arguments are typical for the most anti social nutters there are, such as in corporations (management positions are a good hiding place for sociopaths).
> If the logbooks don't support human-induced climate change, the media will ignore them. > Don't you DARE call it "science" when skepticism is met with derision.
Whatever.
Just about all the skeptics I've heard talk or read something from, are complete and utter fruitcakes. People from unrelated disciplines or not having any decent science background, let alone the ability to analyse and reason above the level of a 5 year old toddler. I don't mean to imply that those with a science background can/do analyse/reason. I've seen plenty of those (PhDs, professors) who are quite close to being morons. I don't know where they got their degrees, but nowhere good I'm sure...
When and if there are skeptics that provide good arguments, they should be heard. I don't think any of the skeptics I know of, provide arguments that are worth listening to, and the arguments given can easily be discounted.
> The results showed that men were slower and less accurate after trying to impress the women. The more they fancied them, the worse their score.
All right. Now try it with magazines about hobbies. I'm sure the more a guy has an interest in the hobby that magazine is about, the slower/less accurate they will be in a test about other things afterwards. I.e., this is just a test about preoccupation about some interest. Women are hardwired into most men's brains, so that almost always works. Also, isn't beauty largely about certain symmetries? I had a discussion about this a while back in relation to something else I won't go into, and in which I assumed that seeing someone beautiful takes more brain power (because your brain is trying to find asymmetries, quick with someone not so beautiful, takes longer to find the imperfections in more beautiful people). This would explain also in a non-sexual way the more preoccupation a man has with more beautiful women.
I concur with the poor research statement somebody else made. This is useless 'research'. Then again, just about any research I've seen in such areas, psychology etc. are junk and/or trivial. At least, that's what they look like to me;-)
I was thinking the same thing. But not necessarily based on them being biased, but for this: Why would anyone want to 'research' this? I can understand making a protocol resilient to poisoning (same as making a computer resilient to virus attacks, there will always be a-holes trying to mess things up wether legal or illegal), or making it faster, adding some nifty features perhaps. But poisoning to prevent illegal sharing with the pathetic argument that this hinders commercial distribution? What kind of a researcher is that? A RIAA paid one I'd guess. Possibly as valuable as those 'researchers' for tobacco companies who said there was no health problem with smoking.
If you think that's childish you don't know what the word childish means.
And I really dislike those type of killjoy remarks.
It reminds me about another area I've been investigating over the past 5 years: The lies and incompetence in the airtravel industry in the Netherlands and Schiphol.
Groups who are against expansion usually take the route of seriously and respectfully opposing people in Schiphol, airtraffic control LVNL, and other organisations such as NLR (air/space 'research' organisation) and PNL (a lobby group lead by serial liar Benno Baksteen).
I don't. I have examined their claims about cost of insulation, noise being generated being supposedly less, noise insulation not helping to reduce annoyance with people by the metric of number of complaints which don't go down.
I have shown all these claims to be lies. Insulation cost is not anywhere near as high as claimed by PNL, noise is not less than in 1990 when applying a useful metric, number of complaints is not a good metric as these can vary easily by a factor of 10-20 x larger or smaller depending on outside factors (e.g. increase in complaints after the twin towers, decrease in complaints by a huge factor in Australia after collapse of a large airline Ansett), and NLR is an amateurish organisation that doesn't even know when to use uppercase/lower case for units (contrary to general use in physics as taught even in schools).
So, how do you deal with those people? Seriously? With respect? You can do that but you won't get anywhere. Those nutters need to be told the truth which is the facts about the above subjects, the facts about their incompetence, the facts about their anti-social nature. You can deal with them respectfully, but unless you don't mind a 30 year gameplan, it's pointless.
What I do is write them emails and put stuff on my website for 2 reasons: To tell those people the truth and show them that I think they are worthless. This is good for me (it's fun), it's good for others (to show them you can call them liars etc. without any fear for a lawsuit, which I don't have as I use their own words against them), also good because it shows others how those people manipulate others. E.g. a common one is claiming the people do something which they actually don't. This is apparantly also common in politics. It bogs down the competition and enables you to go ahead with your own plans without much resistance. An example is that airtravel industry people say the people who complain about the noise make 'emotional arguments' but when examining the arguments, it's actually the airtravel people (e.g. lobby group PNL, former director of Schiphol Gerlach 'the liar' Cerfontaine) who do this all the time.
Would you want to be taken seriously by such people? Who cares what those nutters think!
This is exactly the same as with copyright nonsense. RIAA type organisations abuse the law? Why not give something similar back to them...
To conclude: If you want to be taken seriously by doing everything respectfully, you won't get anywhere within a reasonable time. Also, why can't they do things like this when the opponent is lying/making up facts about lost income or economic problems caused by 'piracy' all the time?
Really? So I jest my idea might be worth a patent,
and it was;-)
I decided to experiment with a matrix multiplication method where a matrix of results * vector of players strengths should give the player 's strength again and one could (hopefully) iteratively obtain the right values.
Did you use or describe this method publicly prior to 1998? If so, what you did could help invalidate the PageRank patent.
Well, I did the following in 1988 (or perhaps early 1989): I went to visit someone I hadn't seen in a long time, and told him about some things that interested me such as programming Reversi/Othello. I took with me various docs including a page from HCC nieuwsbrief (dutch computer club magazine) about a tournament for Reversi programs (from 1987 IIRC, I still have the magazine so I can check and scan it so everyone can see why I thought normal ranking wasn't good enough but that something like resistance-points (=sum of points of the opponent) should be included in some way) and I asked him:
"What do you think about the ranking of these programs?"
He studied them for a bit, and concluded, as I did, that one of the higher ranked programs should be ranked lower. I then explained my idea. If that sort of thing is considered making it public, and enough to invalidate a patent, then yes, I did mention it publicly. I'm not sure in how much detail I went about explaining it, for example the iterations (stopping after a certain number gave good results, but convergence was not an option as I mentioned about. This was also why I didn't use exact methods to find the eigenvector.
But you need to remember: this was ca. 21 years ago, I think I still have the papers/calculations somewhere with my ideas for the reversi program (evaluation functions etc.), but I will have to dig it all out. Perhaps I don't have it any more. I doubt people I discussed it with will have remembered... Also, I didn't publish in a magazine or something like that, as it just seemed too trivial. If I had had internet access at the time, I might have published the idea then via say email .
But even if I can find the papers again, then there still wouldn't be much proof of 'public' description as the people I told it to probably don't remember it.
I will think about it some more (whom I told it to etc.) and try to dig up what I wrote down at the time.
Your method is really just a somewhat inefficient way of finding eigenvector
I knew about eigenvectors/values etc., what I'm describing is just one method of doing this, and I'm describing it in this way because it's probably the easiest way to convey the ideas behind it (which I think are trivial, but it's best to keep thing as simple as possible to describe it to people who may not have had this stuff in school or at university (in NL I already learnt this stuff in school). The real 'problem' was changing it (the idea/method) so it would always converge properly, which wouldn't be the simple eigenvector method.
Slashdot Mirror
Paypal's behavious is unacceptable in many ways and it happens to many people.
The most annoying thing is when you couple it to ebay, and anoying buyers file a not-received or not-as-described claim when it's clear they couldn't have received it yet, or you told them it was delayed because you were, say ill. As has happened with me.
The bad thing is that this partly or wholly freezes your business section that depends on that. Unacceptable.
Paypal and Ebay were once pretty good, the former because payments via bank transfer for small amounts internatioanlly were so expensive, but all that is gone now and the fees for large sums are also far too high...
I suggest everyone use bank tranfers in EURO countries. IBAN/BIC payments are free if done with shared-cost.
> You are forced to have the auditors by agreeing to the licenses to use certain software products.
Unless a court has agreed that this is so, your statement is untrue.
What if the contract says you have to give up your first child in case you stop using M$ products? Even if you agree (which you have no option not to do in many cases due to M$ monopoly and other software not being made for other operating systems), this will not be legally binding.
It's like that with lots of clauses in e.g. warranties. There are often lots of provisions and exclusions in warranties that are not legal as they reduce ones rights compared to the standard rights. That's not allowed... (at least in Europe)
Except, the burden of proof is not on the skeptics. It is on those who wish to prove the exception to the rule is, indeed, the rule. If you want people to believe in global warming's existence, you've got to prove it, irrefutably.
Bullshit.
The burden of proof on refuting an accepted theory is on the non-believers who must convince the other scientists (see a book on philosophy of science, this is how science works). Here I use 'other' assuming those non-believers are scientists which they mostly aren't in the case of global warming.
Further: "you've got to prove it, irrefutably" is impossible. Nothing can be proved irrefutably except in mathematics.
That's a lot to fight against. Generations of people are tired of the propagandized rhetoric and general bullshit.
Oh no they aren't, see politics. And as to your argument
Considering the history of climate prediction (lies, 180 degree inaccuracy, etc.), anyone trying to do that has a hard job ahead of them. We've been hearing "we're 10 years from total annihilation due to our abuse of the planet" since my parents were in grade school, and I've got kids of grade school age now, myself. Climatic temperatures were supposed to be 20 degrees hotter now than they are and agriculture will shortly become unsustainable for the population's feeding, according to what I remember being 'taught' when I was in grade school.
I don't know what school you've been in, but it must have been a crap one. I never heard anything about these matters except a mention here and there, no '20 degrees hotter'. There have been people warning about pollution since esp. the 60s (for example the feminization through plastics, medicine that's nowadays a major pollutant in water cleaning installations), also overpopulation, and you know what, all of those predictions were correct. There are severe problems with pollution everywhere, with ever growing rubbish dumps, and gasp, CO2 levels which can cause global warming.
Now the global warming possibility is taken seriously, crackpots like you start claiming all kinds on nonsense.
Tax fuel so people drive less? Great, you just made maintaining one's lifestyle more expensive. (And, in many, many cases, just ruined the livelihood of many others - never mind lifestyle.
You're quite right, why consider the future of the entire planet when all you want to do is make a living, ride around in your hummer, and use up a shitload of fuel several times that used in other countries. I don't blame you, they are obviously nuts!
And your post was raised to +4 insightful? Was there a convention of the dutch liar club "Groene rekenkamer", of the dutch magazine Elesevier who employs crackpot denier Simon Rozendaal?
What I'm waiting for next from you is a post on why there never was an acid rain problem, as the forests didn't die after all (after the sulphur output decreases from factories etc., but never mind that, a GW-denier doesn't like the facts get in the way of good rant).
"would of", "Could of", "should of", etc derive from contractions of the form "would've", "could've", "should've". Those exist only in extremely informal speech, and virtually never in writing of any kind. However it is particularly common in America for children to hear these contractions as two separate words, and they incorporate them into their speech as such. When they go to write it down, they write is as "would of", and they don't see the problem. If they correctly wrote "would've" they might see the issue, and realize that they should write would have. This is not an issue related to spell checking, as this problem long predated spell checking over here in America. From your surprise about this issue, I'm guessing this is not found in England. My guess is those contractions are never used over there even in really informal speech. Since you are talking about closed captions (American term for subtitles for the hearing impaired, as opposed to translation subtitles) I'm betting the BBC contracted an American company to write the closed captions.
It's something I've not seen before, but I will elaborate, that this is not a problem to do with spell checkers, nor a problem to do with children who don't know how to spell something correctly.
Of course, the contraction isn't even needed, when saying "would have" quickly, it almost sounds the same as "would of". And for some reason this phonetic similarity causes the wrong words to be written down. I've seen in the discussion boards by people from the UK, who I know are around 40 years old, and it really is happening in the last ca. 4 years (in Europe/UK).
So I think it could very well be a UK subtitling company. They were indeed subtitles for hearing impaired. I'm not hearing impaired but I'm dutch and subtitles do help sometimes. I switched them on because of background music in the episode IIRC (one of the women of Torchwood was in disco or whatever).
using technology increases a child's core literary skills. As Researcher Obvious put it, 'The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.' And for those of us worried about a world of 'tl;dr' and 'Y U H8n?'
I don't know about literary skills, but I see an abundance of wrong spellings of words that don't have the right meaning but phonetically are almost the same. An example is 'of' instead of 'have'. E.g. someone may write "he would of done this" instead of "he would have done this". Probably caused by trying to write too fast and not thinking about what they wrote, and that's a phenomenon that I've only seen the last 4 years or so (I think I first spotted this in a subtitle for Torchwood. I almost couldn't believe my eyes, that such a mistake was made by the BBC). If that time estimate is correct for when this sort of thing started, then possibly technology, or probably better the entire lifestyle (fast paced, short attention span, exacerbated by TV's ads that interrupt programs) in the west these days, may be the cause of this.
> Pesticides, too, can perhaps be used in a way that doesn't cause all of those
> nasty chemicals to pollute someone else's property. Until it crosses the border
> from one person's property to the next, it's OK in my book.
Score 4 insightful? Give me a break!
Where the hell do you think those chemicals end up? They get into the entire ecosystem and thus get into *everyone's* property. *That's* why there are limits on using pesticides and calls to reduce that even further.
Oh yes, and to that anonymous coward:
> from her website, she's generally anti-freedom
>
> opposes freedom to own "vicious" dog breeds
> opposes freedom to use "dangerous pesticides" to kill mosquitoes
> opposes freedom to use marijuana
She probably also opposes the freedom to kill people? Ghastly!
> Santa Cruz, California
>
> also known as the World's Largest Open Air Mental Institution.
> P.S. Sorry, but you'll probably only get this if you've actually visited the place.
Except that Santa Cruz is synonymous with crackpot on slashdot due to people with silly names working for SCO.
> Even so, the cream made spinal-cord neural activity linked to pain vanish.
The cream did no such thing, the people's minds did this. It's quite unsurprising that as the brain processes pain (which is just information about damage to tissue), that the brain can also switch it (the processing, i.e. feeling) off.
I can do this whenever I want. First time I did this when I was 12 or so, and for the umpteenth time the lid of the kettle to boil water for tea fell off, and I burnt my hand. Painful and annoying. I said to myself: Enough, no more pain! And gone it was. Not really anything special I believe, see e.g. fakirs.
Of course the 'placebo effect' is more than just turning off pain, it's also about getting better without medicine, i.e. making your body do things to repair itself. This I also do consciously (i.e. I tell myself that my immune system should work harder to kill the 'intruders' :)) and may be the reason why I'm almost never ill, and when I am, I recover very quickly (I never go to a doctor).
Reminds me of a Married with children episode btw.:
[ Al ] I feel strong!
{ Peggy says something }
[ Al ] I feel weak...
(paraphrasing).
> The article asserts that Facebook and MySpace themselves are complicit in this,
> failing to crack down on the abuses they see because they make so much money from
> advertising for the most popular games.
I don't know about this case but I can give information on something quite similar in a very different field.
In Nl there's a website for 2nd hand stuff (that's how it started out anyway) called marktplaats. New stuff is also sold, and there's even a section on meeting people, finding people you lost contact with etc. I didn't notice that until last year, and I read some comments about people being ripped off. This was in the dating section. I thought it might be interesting to have a look see what happened when I sent a message. So, I did, and invariably those messages resulted in replies which asked me to send an SMS to a certain pay number. Which I didn't do because I don't like mobile phones (so I don't even have one...), and why should I? I know many people do like to use mobile phones for message in preference to emails, but something wasn't right. I checked the SMS numbers and it turns out if you send a message a company gets money + the person using that number. There are some legitimate possiblities for this, but all the references were for scams of women asking men (actually, vice versa too sometimes, yes it happens) to SMS, then breaking of contact when the men want to meet or something like that.
So, I examined the structure (use of language) and titles of the contact ads, and more. I concluded that most of the ads were fake.
Some more information:
- The website did remove the relevant ads when I mentioned the SMS stuff
- I mentioned this on the forum section of the website and after that, the number of ads dropped enormously (i.e. others complained about the offending listings).
- No structural solution was implemented even though I suggested and easy one, which was to state on the page for each contact ad, not to use pay-SMS numbers because these are usually from scammers. That should keep replies down to scammers to want you to SMS.
- The website makes money from the scammers as these pay to get the ad back up in front of the lists of ads regularly (so it gets visited more times). This is also of course why they don't take further actions. It also shows what kind of people run this website, they don't care about you.
Please don't say people deserve to ripped off by such scammers. That someone is stupid is not a valid reason for feeling he/she deserves to be ripped off. Assholes deserve to be ripped off, not people who may not be smart. In fact, it's not about being smart, smart people also fall for (confidence) tricks.
> While I believe I understand your point I think you missed mine:
> You have an opportunity, whenever you make a decision on how to acquire
> property (and I would classify a song as property that has vested
> property rights) - buy or rent.
Aha, I see what you mean (I think!) and this was covered implicitly by what I said in my first post, namely that the songs being played on the radio are already paid for by the radio station, and taxes. it depends a bit on which country you're in, but here in NL, everyone pays taxes to support radio/TV even if you have no one. It used to be such that you were not allowed to use a radio or TV unless you had a licence, same as I believe it still is in the UK. As everyone here in NL pays such taxes, everyone may use/listen to a radio, so why no the radio in the supermarket? Even if not done by taxes, the number of people not paying a licence fee (e.g. in the UK) will be small percentage so still not a case for a store licence. And how the songs are being paid for, in one go or 'rented' doesn't matter, they are being paid for. If the customer didn't listen to the song in the store, he could have listened to it in his car, or at home, legal, paid for.
Now, as the songs are continually being paid for (if not by taxes, then still by the radio stations themselves), why should business-use need further compensation?
The only reason would be as someone else mentioned, to have a specific difference in price between a product used commercialy and non-commercially. For music I can understand that for say a dance-club where people specifically come for the music, that in that case it would be appropriate to need a licence as the club's 'work' depends largely on the music makers work. But not for background music, or anything which is just a small part of the whole. Then my argument applies.
>> Should the builders, paint manufacturers, etc. get 'royalties' because you use their products commercially?
>>
>> I don't think so.
> Some do, it's called rent. The choice is to either buy everything outright, or pay a fee for it's use on an ongoing basis. You could buy the right sto a song; just as you can a building; or simply pay an ongoing fee for it's use (and the stuff inside) without every owning anything.
No, it's not rent. The issue is not how you pay for the building (and not how you pay for the music), but the purpose for which it's used.
Ditto for the music. It is argued (also in the Netherlands), that commercial use of music adds value to the experience, or makes workers work better. This is a bogus argument as this is true for just about anything. A building is better than open-air, so if you convert your house to a shop (small shops are often houses in the Netherlands), then suddenly you are supposed to pay the builders, the brick manufacturers, the electriciens, etc. extra money each year because you use your house commercially.
Another example: A comfortable chair in an office. If you use it at home, no problem, use it in the office instead of crappy chairs, and bingo, you're supposed to pay the manufacturer, and anyone who helped make it. Absurd!
> Everyone here is going to talk about how outrageous it is for a supermarket
> to be charged for playing the radio, but the fact of the matter is that they
> use the radio to create a pleasant environment for their customers, which
> makes it a tool of commerce.
Yes, and so is the building itself, the paint to make the walls look nice, and much more.
Should the builders, paint manufacturers, etc. get 'royalties' because you use their products commercially?
I don't think so. So "used as a tool of commerce" is just not a valid argument.
Just as with the building/paint/what's in the building, the radio has already been paid for. Via tax (as in NL) and/or the radio stations which pay to transmit. Everyone can freely listen to the radio privately, so why should anyone have to pay to use it in a store?
> Yet the idea that plot was optional caught on and the same flaw
> was replicated in other games of the era, such as Quake and
> (to a lesser extent) Duke Nukem 3D.
The article appears to only think of games from ca. 1993 on, but I will expand this and include 8 bit home computers in my comments:
Old home computer games invariably had no or a paper thin plot that was described in a manual. Different from Doom? Not at all. Perhaps all early PC games had long introductions or manuals, but not most home computer games. So even if early PC games had good plots, leaving those home computer games out of the comparison is nonsensical as they all influenced each other.
You didn't need to read the manual/instructions in most cases either even for games that had a solid plot. You just dive into it and figure out what's going on later... I did that in 1985 and it still works now. Mostly. For more complex games, e.g. Elite in 1984, reading the manual was both interesting and made the playing more fun. For most games it was moot.
FTA:
> Duke Nukem 3D is a notable turning point from a stylistic point of view,
> introducing the idea of a vocal player character with a pre-defined personality in an FPS
> - but it's one which has also been outdated since then.
Outdated? No way. Duke 3d is still fun to play, just as Doom is. And both are still a lot of fun in a network. You don't need bleeding edge graphics to enjoy the fun of multiplayer gaming nor to enjoy Duke's commentary...
> "An armed body guard protected him at Harvard Law School when he gave a speech last month."
> So, did he ever get use that gun against the people who terminated him, I wonder?
I wonder more why anyone at Harvard law school would invite, and even listen to him?
Yes, it is of course just part of the wonders of modern society, where a sociopath can keep on messing up society via influential positions he gets via friends (i.e. fellow sociopaths). Isn't it great?
> I have two graphs here.
> In the first graph you can see the global warming measured per year.
> In the second paragraph you can see the carbondioxide emissions meassured per year.
> Now let's fold these two together, shall we?" And they totally did not match.
> Man that guy made my fucking day!
I'm sure he did. He's probably a member of a liar-club called "Groene rekenkamer" or associated with it. Or something. Those are all people who have no clue what reasoning is (even if some have a university degree) and no idea about the facts or to interpret them.
I examined many of their claims/reasonings and found them all to be lies and extremely poor reasonings respectively.
And btw. for your information, of course those graphs don't need to match. There are obvious delays as energy can be used e.g. in extra tree growth (which will come to haunt us later when those trees decay and the limit of extra tree growth caused by higher CO2 levels is reached), and in e.g. acidification of the ocean, absorbtion of energy where it's not directly visible at this moment etc.
> Lockheed will be partnered with [snip]
> and - of course - Microsoft
> in developing the MNP
What's "of course" about this?
Really, this is no different from managers, company directors etc. who achieve nothing, or even drive companies bankrupt, yet still manage to obtain the next job to fuck up.
What the hell is up with these people?
Oh btw, any story on slashdot that somehow mentions Microsoft should automatically be assigned a non-removable tag: f*ckmicrosoft.
And finally: What's with the (extremely annoying) capitalisation of each word in a headline on Slashdot and many other places? That's bad practice and makes sentences (headlines too) less readable.
> This is of course an implied criticism of former US president George W Bush and the neo-conservatives,
> who were often accused of trying to change the world in their image.
This is putting it all wrong as if they had some sort of rational ideal that they strove towards.
In fact, they were (and still are of course) sociopaths who don't give a damn about anyone but themselves.
I knew this about G.W. Bush the first time I saw him. This was the first election, with the counting problems going on and Bush said (paraphrased): "Let me get on, I have a administration to form". Of course, as the votes were close, Gore could have said exactly the same thing so I was disgusted. I became more disgusted when news media (papers, TV) never made any comment about this, which really made me aware of how poor a job journalists do.
In general, such reversible non-arguments are typical for the most anti social nutters there are, such as in corporations (management positions are a good hiding place for sociopaths).
> If the logbooks don't support human-induced climate change, the media will ignore them.
> Don't you DARE call it "science" when skepticism is met with derision.
Whatever.
Just about all the skeptics I've heard talk or read something from, are complete and utter fruitcakes. People from unrelated disciplines or not having any decent science background, let alone the ability to analyse and reason above the level of a 5 year old toddler. I don't mean to imply that those with a science background can/do analyse/reason. I've seen plenty of those (PhDs, professors) who are quite close to being morons. I don't know where they got their degrees, but nowhere good I'm sure...
When and if there are skeptics that provide good arguments, they should be heard. I don't think any of the skeptics I know of, provide arguments that are worth listening to, and the arguments given can easily be discounted.
Wired article:
> Swartz decided to use the trial to grab as many of the public court records as he could and, perversely, release them to the public.
How is that perverse? 'Ironically' would perhaps fit, but using the word perverse seems, eh, perverse :)
And 20 million documents, one every 3 seconds should take 1.9 years. However, the wired article says it was done in a few weeks. What am I missing?
> "extreme, extreme expense that goes into making music,"
Bullshit, there are no extreme expenses in making music.
> The results showed that men were slower and less accurate after trying to impress the women. The more they fancied them, the worse their score.
;-)
All right. Now try it with magazines about hobbies. I'm sure the more a guy has an interest in the hobby that magazine is about, the slower/less accurate they will be in a test about other things afterwards. I.e., this is just a test about preoccupation about some interest. Women are hardwired into most men's brains, so that almost always works. Also, isn't beauty largely about certain symmetries? I had a discussion about this a while back in relation to something else I won't go into, and in which I assumed that seeing someone beautiful takes more brain power (because your brain is trying to find asymmetries, quick with someone not so beautiful, takes longer to find the imperfections in more beautiful people). This would explain also in a non-sexual way the more preoccupation a man has with more beautiful women.
I concur with the poor research statement somebody else made. This is useless 'research'. Then again, just about any research I've seen in such areas, psychology etc. are junk and/or trivial. At least, that's what they look like to me
] Researcher is the wrong word.
I was thinking the same thing. But not necessarily based on them being biased, but for this: Why would anyone want to 'research' this? I can understand making a protocol resilient to poisoning (same as making a computer resilient to virus attacks, there will always be a-holes trying to mess things up wether legal or illegal), or making it faster, adding some nifty features perhaps. But poisoning to prevent illegal sharing with the pathetic argument that this hinders commercial distribution? What kind of a researcher is that? A RIAA paid one I'd guess. Possibly as valuable as those 'researchers' for tobacco companies who said there was no health problem with smoking.
If you think that's childish you don't know what the word childish means.
And I really dislike those type of killjoy remarks.
It reminds me about another area I've been investigating over the past 5 years: The lies and incompetence in the airtravel industry in the Netherlands and Schiphol.
Groups who are against expansion usually take the route of seriously and respectfully opposing people in Schiphol, airtraffic control LVNL, and other organisations such as NLR (air/space 'research' organisation) and PNL (a lobby group lead by serial liar Benno Baksteen).
I don't. I have examined their claims about cost of insulation, noise being generated being supposedly less, noise insulation not helping to reduce annoyance with people by the metric of number of complaints which don't go down.
I have shown all these claims to be lies. Insulation cost is not anywhere near as high as claimed by PNL, noise is not less than in 1990 when applying a useful metric, number of complaints is not a good metric as these can vary easily by a factor of 10-20 x larger or smaller depending on outside factors (e.g. increase in complaints after the twin towers, decrease in complaints by a huge factor in Australia after collapse of a large airline Ansett), and NLR is an amateurish organisation that doesn't even know when to use uppercase/lower case for units (contrary to general use in physics as taught even in schools).
So, how do you deal with those people? Seriously? With respect? You can do that but you won't get anywhere. Those nutters need to be told the truth which is the facts about the above subjects, the facts about their incompetence, the facts about their anti-social nature. You can deal with them respectfully, but unless you don't mind a 30 year gameplan, it's pointless.
What I do is write them emails and put stuff on my website for 2 reasons: To tell those people the truth and show them that I think they are worthless. This is good for me (it's fun), it's good for others (to show them you can call them liars etc. without any fear for a lawsuit, which I don't have as I use their own words against them), also good because it shows others how those people manipulate others. E.g. a common one is claiming the people do something which they actually don't. This is apparantly also common in politics. It bogs down the competition and enables you to go ahead with your own plans without much resistance. An example is that airtravel industry people say the people who complain about the noise make 'emotional arguments' but when examining the arguments, it's actually the airtravel people (e.g. lobby group PNL, former director of Schiphol Gerlach 'the liar' Cerfontaine) who do this all the time.
Would you want to be taken seriously by such people? Who cares what those nutters think!
This is exactly the same as with copyright nonsense. RIAA type organisations abuse the law? Why not give something similar back to them...
To conclude: If you want to be taken seriously by doing everything respectfully, you won't get anywhere within a reasonable time. Also, why can't they do things like this when the opponent is lying/making up facts about lost income or economic problems caused by 'piracy' all the time?
That's PageRank
Really? So I jest my idea might be worth a patent, and it was ;-)
I decided to experiment with a matrix multiplication method where a matrix of results * vector of players strengths should give the player 's strength again and one could (hopefully) iteratively obtain the right values.
Did you use or describe this method publicly prior to 1998? If so, what you did could help invalidate the PageRank patent.
Well, I did the following in 1988 (or perhaps early 1989): I went to visit someone I hadn't seen in a long time, and told him about some things that interested me such as programming Reversi/Othello. I took with me various docs including a page from HCC nieuwsbrief (dutch computer club magazine) about a tournament for Reversi programs (from 1987 IIRC, I still have the magazine so I can check and scan it so everyone can see why I thought normal ranking wasn't good enough but that something like resistance-points (=sum of points of the opponent) should be included in some way) and I asked him:
"What do you think about the ranking of these programs?"
He studied them for a bit, and concluded, as I did, that one of the higher ranked programs should be ranked lower. I then explained my idea. If that sort of thing is considered making it public, and enough to invalidate a patent, then yes, I did mention it publicly. I'm not sure in how much detail I went about explaining it, for example the iterations (stopping after a certain number gave good results, but convergence was not an option as I mentioned about. This was also why I didn't use exact methods to find the eigenvector.
But you need to remember: this was ca. 21 years ago, I think I still have the papers/calculations somewhere with my ideas for the reversi program (evaluation functions etc.), but I will have to dig it all out. Perhaps I don't have it any more. I doubt people I discussed it with will have remembered... Also, I didn't publish in a magazine or something like that, as it just seemed too trivial. If I had had internet access at the time, I might have published the idea then via say email .
But even if I can find the papers again, then there still wouldn't be much proof of 'public' description as the people I told it to probably don't remember it.
I will think about it some more (whom I told it to etc.) and try to dig up what I wrote down at the time.
Your method is really just a somewhat inefficient way of finding eigenvector
I knew about eigenvectors/values etc., what I'm describing is just one method of doing this, and I'm describing it in this way because it's probably the easiest way to convey the ideas behind it (which I think are trivial, but it's best to keep thing as simple as possible to describe it to people who may not have had this stuff in school or at university (in NL I already learnt this stuff in school). The real 'problem' was changing it (the idea/method) so it would always converge properly, which wouldn't be the simple eigenvector method.